AMD's Barcelona and Agena CPUs are almost here, but don't expect out-of-the box compatibility with the current AM2 motherboards. Before the emergence of AM3 sockets, AMD will release AM2+ designs to support the new quad-cores. There are also a couple of new chipsets to be integrated in the AM2+ motherboards.

These chipsets will only be DDR2-compatible. However, this shouldn't mean that Intel will claim supremacy with their DDR3-ready Bearlake family. This is due to latency specifications that remain high and thus, AMD's dual-channel DDR2-1066 support should still prove faster than sub-DDR3-1600 memories. AMD further claims that the new memory controllers integrated into their quad-cores will once again operate at +90% efficiency, while Intel is currently stuck with a front-side bus that can only deal with a single DDR2-1066 channel.

The two new chipsets AMD prepares for their 10th generation CPUs are the RD790 and the RS790. The first one is aimed at high-end motherboards, while the second one represents more of a mainstream solution with an updated IGP architecture.

All of the showcased systems from last week's AMD conference in Monterey, CA were actually powered by RD790/RS790 motherboards. There were two prototype RD790 motherboards codenamed "Hammerhead" and "Wahoo," but the design of these motherboards is highly unlikely to see mass production releases.

Let us now analyze each motherboard. The showcased "Hammerhead" featured one Socket AM2+ for Agena/Kuma cores, as well as two brand new PCIe 2.0 slots apart from the usual two full-sized PCIe 1.1 slots. Browsing over the PCIe specifications we find out that these are backward compatible with the 1.1 designs and this could mean that AMD's future systems won't only be quad-core, but Quad-Crossfire (four graphics cards) as well. It was pointed out that the RD790 Northbridge chip will work with either current SB600 or upcoming SB700 Southbridge chips. On the I/O side, the motherboard features four SATA connectors and only one PATA port, two Gigabit network connectors via Marvell's PCIe based controllers, with audio support provided by Realtek's 7.1 audio chipsets.


As you might remember, the Monterey conference also presented a dual quad-core system last week. This system was powered by AMD's "Wahoo" motherboard that features two Socket 1207+ (a.k.a F+, yet another type of socket) for Phenom FX CPUs. The motherboard features digital PWM systems to ensure for highly efficient and stable CPUs and three full-sized (two PCIe 2.0 + one PCIe 1.1). Looks like this kind of motherboard will be eating a tremendous amount of power alongside a Crossfire setup. However, AMD specifically stated that it will also ship single socket F+ motherboards, which should be less demanding on power consumption aspects.

Lastly, there was a RS790 motherboard with no wacky codename whatsoever. The RS790 chipset is said to be the successor of 690G. It also supports one regular PCIe 1.1.x16 slot and remains to be determined whether it recognizes the PCIe 2.0 standard or not. This chipset is supposed to power AMD's Puma mobile platform and this means that AMD will have DX10 IGPs for the next generation mobile systems.