ATI 690, the Chipset with a Vengeance

As one of the benefits which followed ATI's acquisition by AMD is the 690 series chipset. It was released by AMD on the 28th of February, 2007, and it uses an integrated ATI Radeon X1250 GPU. NVIDIA has a counterattack in store for AMD's series of chipsets with its GeForce 7050/nForce 630a and GeForce 7050/nForce 630i chipsets.

While this competition has grown even more because of AMD's initial desire of taking over NVIDIA, which didn't end exactly as planned, NVIDIA has finally kept, like AMD, the option of supplying chipsets for both AMD and Intel processors. We have NVIDIA's GeForce 7050/nForce 630a and GeForce 7050/630i, while AMD has the AMD 690G on Socket AM2 and CeBIT has revealed the ATI 690 based motherboard offer for Intel.

Considering that when fighting a war you shouldn't think of individual victories, but rather about the sum of victories as being more decisive in winning the entire war, AMD is making small steps in order to gain some of the market share Intel took once it released the Core architecture. I have a different opinion regarding Intel's success; once they hit one major objective, the Core architecture, most of their work in other domains, such as NAND memory production and chip manufacturing has also grown and given them success, mainly because like in a building crash, when the lower level goes down, the upper ones will follow, a Domino effect if you will.

Now on a surface scan of both these offerings from NVIDIA and AMD, there are some advantages for AMD, their chipset supporting a maximum resolution of 2048x1536 pixels, while the GeForce 7050/nForce 630a goes up to 1920x1440 pixels. On the other side NVIDIA's chipset can support up to 12 USB 2.0 ports while AMD gives away 10 USB 2.0 ports. Both of them support one Parallel ATA connection and offer HDMI support.