ATI's RD580 is full of PCI Express promise

[Alpine]

Two times 16PCIe chipset


ATI IS working on a new chipset codenamed RD580 and this will be nothing more than RD480, already shipping Crossfire chipset but with more PCIe lanes.


Nvidia is making a big fuss about its C8K04 chipset that can enable two by sixteen PCIe slots and ATI has its horses to race.

Nvidia chipsets are available as we speak and you can go out and buy a motherboard based on Nvidia's new offering and you can go out and buy Crossfire motherboard based on a chipset that supports two by eight PCIe speeds only.

ATI is lagging with its chipsets but Nvidia is playing with dual cards a little bit more than ATI. RD580 is the name of the north bridge while this chipset can be used with ATI's RS450 Southbridge. We are sure you will be able to use ULI chipsets as well.

ATI won't need interconnecting between two cards as soon as those motherboards are available so it will be a big step for the firm. We still need to play with RD480 first to see how ATI did its homework with dual graphic capable chipsets but the company was working hard on it. We are expecting to see the boards based on this chipset sometime in January 2006 while the chipset is sampling now and it should be in production till December.

The INQuirer