CHW has put several slides of AMD’s chipset roadmap online.
While there has been room for improvement for ATI/AMD’s Southbridge for some time now, we can note significant changes are planned. Amongst the most interesting, there is C6 and Fusion (for Power Management) support, the integration of a Gigabit MAC controller and clock generator, the likely transition to SATA 6Gb/s, AHCI 1.2 support, as well as the addition of an embedded controller with DASH support. These characteristics should enable lowering the cost of
Business Class platforms as they impose these types of functions.
In terms of USB, while the number of ports increases, there is not yet USB 3.0. Finally, it seems that the introduction of the Socket AM3, which will take the 45nm Phenom Deneb and enable them to function with DDR3, is planned for the first quarter of 2009. We can only hope the price of this memory continues to decrease until then as it should also be found in the Value segment (entry level).
