Q2 2011 Sees Launch of AMD 9-Series Chipsets for Bulldozer

With all the talk about AMD's CPUs, end-users have, predictably, begun to wonder when the chipsets and motherboards would show up, and it seems that some inkling of the answer to that question has now arisen.

Though not exactly an official press announcement, a certain post on the AMDZone Forums presented a number of pictures which look like roadmap slides.

There will be, as said slides indicate, four chipsets aimed at the desktop market, one of which will feature integrated graphics.

The full list includes the 980G, 990FX, 990X and 970, all of which are differentiated from each other through their feature support.

The 980G can handle a PCI Express x16 slot, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs and has an integrated DirectX 10.1 graphics core clocked at 560 MHz. There is also UVD 2.0 support.

Moving on, according to the slides, the 970 and 990X are almost identical, except that CrossFireX multi-GPU setups are supported only by the latter (one 2 x PCI Express x8 configuration that is).

Finally, the 990FX can cope with two PCI Express X16 slots, or four of them set in x8, but is otherwise similar to the others.

These northbridge solutions will have their base capabilities complemented by the SB950 and SB920 southbridge chipsets.

All of them are ready to supply any system with up to 14 USB ports and six SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors.

The SB950 is superior to its sibling by virtue of its support for RAID and a pair of extra PCI Express 2.0 lanes, these details making it the so-called 'flagship.'

As end-users may or may not have guessed by now, the Bulldozer CPUs are those that this series of chipsets will serve, AM3+ chips as it were.

The actual official release is supposed to occur sometime during the second quarter of 2011.