14 DAY TRIAL // Lately, AMD's upcoming Sabine and Lynx platforms have been the target of great scrutiny as many leaks have detailed different specs of the company's next-generation chipsets, the most recent of these comparing Intel's latest P67 PCH with AMD's future Hudson-D3 solution.
The comparison is taken directly from an internal AMD document destined to be sent to the company's business partners and was uncovered by the Donanim Haber website.
According to the table, the Hudson-D3 carries an important number of improvements over the P67 chipset, like the addition of four native USB 3.0 ports.
Furthermore, AMD's chipset also includes a higher number of SATA 6Gbps ports (six in comparison with the two available in the P67), a more flexible display output arrangement as well as up to three legacy PCI slots.
Unfortunately for AMD, there are also some areas where the Hudson-D3 lags behind the P67, such as the limited support for RAID modes and the lack of an integrated Gigabit Ethernet NIC chip.
Recently, it has been uncovered that in addition to all the features listed here, the Lynx platform will support some sort of Hybrid CrossFireX mode which allows for the on-die GPU to be used together with a standalone graphics card in order to deliver improved gaming performance.
This new technology works only with GPUs from the Northern Islands family, AMD providing a comparison between a Llano processor paired together with a Turks discrete GPU and the same APU without any add-on graphics card installed.
In the comparison, the Hybrid CrossFireX mode enabled the Llano APU to deliver 60% better performance overall.
The Sabine and Lynx platforms will be released together with AMD's second generation APU, code-named Llano, as early as May 2011.
Llano will be available in dual, triple and quad-core configurations and is destined to replace the Athlon II in the desktop space, early reports suggesting its performance is on part with that of an Intel Core i3 540 processor.
