AMD demoes PCIe 2.0 in action
 

New chipsets show promise

AMD WILL STAY in DDR2 land with upcoming generation of chipsets, but this does not mean their everlasting competitor will have a performance advantage. Even though AMD will use dual-channel DDR2-1066, the company still expects to beat DDR3 in performance numbers at least until DDR3-1600 becomes a reality. This is much to the fact that memory controller inside the AMD processors always worked at very high efficiency, such as 90+ percentage, while Intel is currently stuck with a frontside bus that cannot eat up more than a single DDR2-1066 channel, yet alone two (Intel and Nvidia chipsets with dual-channel memory controllers make up in write arena, since write speed is almost the same as the read speed - something that single-channel memory cannot do).
AMD will support members of 10h family (Barcelona/Agena/Griffin) with two chipsets: RD790 and RS790. RD790 is a high-peforming chipset, while RS790 features next step in integrated graphics for AMD.
On a recently held CTO Technology Summit in Monterey, AMD's execs were happy to show Agena FX (rebranded Barcelona) and Agena happily running in motherboards based on RD790 chipset. As it goes, motherboards that were shown carried names of fishes. These are engineering motherboards, so do not expect that this layout will come to life, unless some AMD's partner such as Sapphire comes on board.

AMD Hammerhead
AMD Hammerhead is a motherboard that features one Socket AM2+ for Agena/Kuma cores. It features two PCIe 2.0 slots and two regular full-sized PCIe 1.1 slots. If you take into account that PCIe 2.0 is backwards compatible with 1.1, you can see making the ground for a Quad Crossfire concept, that is probably going to debut with arrival of HD2400/2600 (RV610/630) and upcoming RV670 chips. RD790 Northbridge chip will work with either SB600 or upcoming SB700 Southbridge chip. Board requires 24-pin + 8-pin ATX connectors plus single 4-pin molex connector, nothing special when it comes to the high-end motherboards of today. Board features four SATA and a single PATA port. Two Gigabit network connectors are supported via Marvell's PCIe based controllers, while 7.1 audio is provided by RealTek.

Wahoo or "Will the real 4x4 please stand up"
AMD Wahoo is a motherboard that features two Socket 1207+ (F+) for Phenom FX (Agena FX) series of processors. We like the fact that power for the processor is supplied via digital PWM, resulting in high efficiency. Wahoo features three full-sized PCIe slots out of which two are PCIe 2.0, and one is your regular PCIe 1.1. One slot is your regular PCI slot, and one small green coloured slot is PCIe x1.
We are surprised to see such amount of power connectors, since the board requires two 4-pin molex connectors, two 8-pin 12V+ ones and a regular 24-pin ATX connector. All in all, expect that this beast in its current engineering form requires no less that four 8-pin connectors (two for the motherboard, two for graphics cards) - but then again, this is for those users that want absolute maximum. Luckily for sane people, AMD plans to bring Phenom FX into the world of regular single-socket motherboards, so you can take a deep breath and relax.

DirectX 10 coming to a cheap computer later in the year
Third shown board features RS790 chipset, successor of 690G. Given the AMD brand name policy, it is not hard to imagine that this chipset could see the light of the day as 790G. We could not find the name of the reference motherboard (oddly enough, it wasn't printed on the PCB) chipset comes with regular PCIe 1.1. x16 slot, and we are not certain about PCIe 2.0 support. This chipset is also a base for Puma mobile platform - so yes, it really does feature DirectX 10 graphics subsystem.
And for the end, we leave you with the picture of very first R600 board that works in PCIe 2.0 slot: this power hog needs only single 6-pin PEG connector on the board itself, because the slot can provide 150W of juice, thus making one 6-pin connector redundant.

R600 requires 200+ Watts... but if the board can deliver 150W, do you need all those extra connectors then? Of course, not.
Of course, unless a certain product codenamed R670 (65nm R600) does not require equal amount of juice. Judging by our sources, design plan is to cut the power by a milestone, so it should not be the case.

All the pictures were provided courtesy of dottore Corsini from HWupgrade.it. Thanks buddy.


The INQuirer