14 DAY TRIAL // According to Chilehardware.com, AMD has plans for the chipsets which will accompany their brand new shiny processors we expect seeing by the end of the year. These plans indicate the move AMD is going to make towards socket AM3, with an intermediary stop which will be socket AM2+.
From the roadmap, we are able to see current progress from the AMD RS690, RS690C and the SB600, with the launch of AMD?s 3rd generation HyperTransport specification being said to take place in the second half of this year. Along side this, we will also witness the introduction of RD790+, RX740+ and RS740+ nortbridges, all of which will use the SB600 southbridge.
RD790+ is stated to support either CrossFire configurations with two x16 PCI Express connectors, or in Quad CrossFire mode in four x8 configurations. There is also no mention of PCI Express 2.0 specifications being available for this chipset, even though it's performance based, these specs are nevertheless found on the mainstream offer, RX740+.
The beginning of 2008 brings a new northbridge, the RS780, which is believed to feature DX10 Unified Shader support, HyperTransport 3 specification, Universal Video Decoding and PCI Express 2.0 compatibility. The other better half of this northbridge is the SB700 southbridge, featuring six Serial ATA 3Gbps connections supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, with 12 USB 2.0 ports and an additional two for NAND Flash memory modules.
RS780 has been detailed as supporting both Agena AM2+ processors as well as Greyhound AM3 processors, with DDR2-1066 and DDD3-1333MHz compatibility. Socket AM2+ motherboards are believed to support socket AM3 processors by a simple BIOS upgrade, much like the case of Intel and its Core processors being compatible with Socket 775.