PCI Express Athlon chipset competitor
ATI HAS NEW horses to run and this time the “steeds” work with 939 Athlon chips. ATI entered the chipset market almost two years ago and focused on the Pentium 4 chipset more than on Athlons even although it kicked off business with the Radeon IGP 320 for Athlon and IGP 340 for P4 at the same time.
Late last year it introduced the Radeon 9100 IGP, a very nice chipset and very competitive with Intel’s integrated jobbie and it seems that this is the road it wants its nags’ hooves to clatter down now.
The Canadian firm didn’t jump on the first Athlon 64/FX bandwagon as it knew that there would be socket and Hypertransport changes and it wanted to go for the socket that will stay in place for some time. Of course it didn’t want to mess with AGP so introduced a PCI Express chipset.
This is why the RS480, its little pony, was restrained until Q3 and it’s likely that you will be able to see some design wins very soon. Actually ALI was showing this chipset at Computex since it can use ALI’s Southbridge but we know that ATI is working on its own south bridge as well.
We don’t have any idea about the performance of the chipset but we heard that the project is going as planned and that some boards are expected soon.
This chipset might have a DirectX 9 core similar to 9600 inside that would definitely make a difference to the market. We will learn soon enough. Clip, clop. µ
News source: The Inquirer
