AMD to Delay AM3 Compliant Motherboards

AMD's chipset roadmap has been updated by a new slide that emerged today on the Web. According to it, the company will delay the RD890, RS880 motherboards with SB800 chipset, as well as the  mainstream AMD 760G IGP. It looks like the Sunnyvale chip manufacturer will add DDR3 support to its 790 FX and SB750, and it also plans to relaunch the chips at the beginning of 2009. The AMD 760G IGP mainstream chipset was originally slated for a Q4 2008 release.

The existing high-end duo of 790 FX and SB750 supports AM3 sockets and Advanced Micro Devices plans to relaunch them in the first half of the next year, by the time its AM3 chips should also appear. It is worth noticing that 790 FX comes with support for HyperTransport 3.1 links, which can offer interconnect bandwidths of up to 6400 MT/s to the processor.

The RD890, RS880 will come along with SB800 chipset and DDR3, and are said to be the first platforms with AM3 compliance. The AM3 socket will allow AMD processors to access DDR3 memory. The new processor will have to feature DDR3 integrated memory controllers (IMC). Due to the delay, the AM3 chipsets will not be available by the time the company is expected to launch its next-generation CPUs. The new slide can be seen here.

Although the competition with Intel has pushed AMD a little backwards, the past few months showed that the company is ready to return to the battlefield. We should see some new additions on the processors side, especially because the chip manufacturer announced that it would make the transition to the 45nm fabrication process by the end of this year. The Deneb processor is said to come next year with a lot of performance improvements over the current generation, and the company also revealed it plans to launch a new mobile processor to compete with Intel's Atom.