AMD's Llano Motherboard Chipsets Get USB 3.0 Certification

USB-IF has just issued USB 3.0 certification for two of AMD's upcoming Hudson chipset that will be used together with the company's Llano processors. This means that the Sunnyvale-based outfit is one step closer to the release of its second-generation Fusion platforms.

The certification wasn't followed by a press release from any of the two organizations, but SemiAccurate has managed to spot these chips in USB-IF's list of supported products.

This makes AMD the first company to get certification for a chipset level implementation of USB 3.0.

Intel is also expected to go this route later this year as the upcoming Panther Point chipset, that is going to be launched together with the company's Ivy Bridge processors, will also feature native USB 3.0 support.

The two chipsets in question are the A70M FCH (also known as Hudson-M3) and the A75 FCH (also known as Hudson-D3). The first one will be used in mobile computing systems, such as notebooks, and the latter is targeting desktop systems.

According to SemiAccurate, both these chips feature four USB 3.0 ports and were co-developed with Renesas.

Outside of USB 3.0 support, the Hudson-M3 and Hudson-D3 chipsets also get six 6Gbps SATA ports, no less than ten USB 2.0 ports, RAID 0 and 1 support, four PCI Express Gen 2 lanes and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

In addition, the Hudson-D3 can pack up to three regular PCI slots and also gain RAID 10 support.

Together with these chipsets, AMD will also release its second-generation Fusion architecture CPUs, code named Llano, that are built using tweaked Stars cores (found in Phenom II and Athlon II chips) paired together with a DirectX 11 compatible on-die GPU.

From what we know until now, the official launch will include five desktop processors, four quad-core and one dual-core, and the chips will be built using the 32nm manufacturing process.

Furthermore, all of them will get an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory controller, an integrated PCI Express 2.0 controller and utilize the FM1 socket, while some CPUs will also support AMD's Turbo Core technology.

Commercial shipment of the A-series “Llano” chips is expected to start on July 20th, 2011.