AMD Prepares a New Crossfire

AMD's 580 and 480 chipsets are getting kind of old, being beaten by the latest Nvidia chipset with quite a wide margin. Even 580X with Crossfire support and two PCI-Ex lanes for AM2 processors, a chipset with very good overclocking potential, good stability and top performance is showing its age, so AMD decided to launch a new line of chipsets.

RD790, the new AMD chipset, will probably be launched in the same general time period as the new quad-core Barcelona based processor or the Phenom processor designed both for single and double CPU platforms. The upcoming RD790 will work either on single or on double processor platforms for AMD desktop products. The number of supported PCIe is increased to four slots for the new AMD's socket AM2+ designed for the new Stars family of processors.

Motherboard producers will be able to distribute the supported PCIe lanes in various ways, including a top configuration with four PCIe 16x and eight lane signaling. The maximum number of PCIe lanes supported by the new RD790 is an astonishing 41, but it is hard to imagine that someone will ever use all of them. According to the AMD roadmap, the multiple PCIe v2.0 slots will be used for a better CrossFire multi-GPU technology. Up to four ATI / AMD Radeons nodel HD 2900 XT graphics cards will be supported by the new CrossFire implemented into the RD790 chipset. The new CrossFire configuration will be called Quad CrossFire (duh!).

SLI solutions from Nvidia support only dual or quad graphics cards, while the Quad CrossFire should be able to handle from one to four (full complement) video cards. ATI / AMD claims that a Quad CrossFire system running with three video cards will increase performance by a 2.6 factor, while running with only two video cards will give a performance boost of 1.8 times. The roadmap from AMD says nothing about how a system equipped with Quad CrossFire and four video cards would fare.