14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Device is expected to soon launch its latest generation of chipsets for both the mobile and the desktop computer market segments which will be compatible with the soon to come dual and quad core Phenom central processing units and may even prove a valuable addition to the battle against Nvidia on the chipset market.
This is the seventh series of computer chipsets from Advanced Micro Devices and the manufacturing company is expected to launch a rich product offering, including the RD790, RD780 and RX780 chipset models. While these mainboard chipsets are backward compatible with the existing K8 processor architecture, AMD mainly designed them to work with the upcoming K10 central processing units.
Like all hardware components, these too come in several flavors, with the high end line composed of the RD780, RD790 and RX780 chipsets which will be later targeted at different market segments. Among the interesting new additions and features of this new product line, there is one that was never before met in an AMD product, the AutoXpress feature.
The AutoXpress feature is expected to have a great impact over the total computing performance of the system as it will allow some measure of automatic overclocking of the PCI Express system bus when using AMD graphics cards based on the R580 or newer graphics processing units as well as accelerating the speed of the data transfers between cards running in a CrossFire setup. Another good to have feature that is provided by AutoXpress and found in these new AMD chipsets is the possibility to double pump the HyperTransport system bus when using a HT 1.0 compliant processor as these chipsets are all coming with HT 3.0 enabled.
Yet another new feature found implemented under the AMD AutoXpress banner is the MemBoost function that is aimed at accelerating memory bandwidth performance in computer systems which are equipped with DDR2 memory modules that are running at 800MHz or higher. This function is used to alter the memory timings and so increase the total available bandwidth and according to the news site nordichardware, it will only work with the K8 generation of processing units.
The MemBoost feature also offer native support for reading the best SPD memory timings which are typically found in memory modules from the enthusiast market segment. If several SPD settings are found, the chipset will automatically choose one that gives the maximum attainable performance, but this last feature will only be available for the RD790 chipset line.