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.
Threaded Mode
