In 2012, AMD plans to introduce a replacement for the company's current 990FX chipset for AM3+ processors that will bring a series of improvements meant to make it more competitive with Intel's upcoming 7-series platform controller hubs (PCHs).
The new chipset will be called the
AMD 1090FX and it was just detailed in a leaked company slide that entered into the possession of the Donanim Haber publication.
Judging by the information provided by the document, the most important feature that the upcoming 1090FX will introduce over its predecessor is the native support for USB 3.0 which was previously just present in the AMD A75 chipset for Llano APUs.
Right now, we don't know the number of USB 3.0 ports that the 1090FX will support, but the A75 is capable of driving four such connectors, so the new chipset should at least match its smaller brother in this area.
Another change which AMD plans to introduce with the 1090FX controller is the support for a maximum of eight SATA 6Gbps ports, which brings the platform a major advantage in its fight against Intel that has limited even its high-performance
X79 chipset to a pair of 6Gbps ports.
Other features include support for a total of 32 PCI Express lanes, which can be split in order to drive two PCIe x16 slots with support for AMD's CrossFireX and Nvidia's SLI multi-GPU technologies.
Together with the 1090FX, AMD is expected to also introduce the 1070
chipset that comes without the USB 3.0 and dual-PCI Express x16 capabilities of its older brother, but still gets eight SATA 6Gbps ports.
Sadly, PCI Express 3.0 support will be missing from both the 1070 and the 1090FX chipsets, so AMD is still behind Intel in this area.
A more specific launch date for the 1090FX apart from the 2012 timeframe suggested by the leaked slide is not available.
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