14 DAY TRIAL // The new chipset coming from Ati has been named by AMD and now is known as AMD 690G. RS690 follows AMD's renaming process but it seems that the chipset would have been renamed anyway even if Ati remained a single company. The design of AMD 690G seems to be rather polished at the moment and the nearly finished product has reached stepping A12. TSMC will be mass producing RS690 chipsets in 2007 using an 80nm fabrication process.
The upcoming chipset is expected to feature a fully capable Radeon X700 derived GPU that has been also renamed ATI Radeon X1250. The IGP supports DirectX9 with shader model 2.0 and comes with AVIVO technology that enables the video engine of the Radeon X1250 to use hardware accelerated decompression of H.264 and VC1 video content when watching a Blu-ray or HD DVD disk that uses this compression method.
Four other variants, including the RS690C, RS690T, RS690M and RS690MC will complete the RS690 line. The RS690C will be the base chipset and it will do without an integrated TMDS transmitter while the RS690T which is the high-end variant will come with support for external video memory also know as Sideport Memory. The RS690M and RS690MC will be targeted towards the mobile market and will be used in AMD Turion powered notebooks.
Among other features, the AMD 690G includes support for one PCIe x16 and four PCIe x1. The AMD 690G will probably pair up with AMD's SB600 southbridge which will add SATA 3.0Gbps and high definition audio support. Judging on the pinout of the chipset, the AMD 690G should be pin compatible with the previous Radeon Xpress 1100 and that means it could as well use the same PCB. First RS690 motherboards will arrive in early 2007. The price tag is currently unknown.