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Roadmap leak indicates ATI direction after AMD acquisition

07:12 - Friday 6 October 2006 by THG Reporting Team - source: Tom's Hardware

Chicago (IL) - An ATI chipset roadmap has appeared on two South American websites today. At least for now, it appears that the acquisition by AMD could accelerate the rollout of products and ATI. While battling Intel on the low-end, ATI’s chipsets and graphics processors begin to align closely with AMD to offer high-end gaming solutions for FX processors.

According to the slides The currently available RD580 Crossfire chipset will have to maintain the enthusiast interest for this year and in the first quarter of 2007 on the very high-end, but it will be complemented withy the single-card RX690 in the upper mainstream segment. ATI’s Crossfire product line will include the RD580 for motherboards with prices above $120, the RD550 for prices below $100 and the RD480 for less than $60.

In the second quarter of 2007, ATI will debut its first DirectX10 capable processor in the R600 series (RV610), which will be paired with the RD580 chipset initially. Starting in the third quarter, ATI will introduce a new generation Crossfire chipset, code-named RD790, which will support Hypertransport 3, the second generation PCI Express bus, DirectX 10 and AMD’s first quad-core processor.

The RD790 will be complemented by the single-slot RX790, as well as the RS790 integrated graphics chipset in the mainstream and value segments. According to the roadmap ATI and AMD are planning to closely align Crossfire chipsets with AMD’s FX processors on the high-end of performance PCs.