RS485, RS690

With all the Crossfire news floating around these days, we have neglected to mention several new chipsets from ATI on the discrete and IGP sector. ATI's first chipset, RS485, is expected to launch before the end of the year. We first mentioned RS485 back in October, but details about the new 110nm chip appear to be circulating at the manufacturers. The new chip sports an X300 graphics core, but is pin for pin compatible with RS480 and RS482 - so expect to see motherboard manufacturers roll out the new cores very quickly. In fact, our documents reveal that RS485 is the same die as RS482, leading us to believe the only difference between RS482 and RS485 is a slightly higher clock on the IGP core.

RS690 is a step up from RS485, but will launch just about the same time. We mentioned RS690 a few months ago, but since then it appears as though ATI has established that the RS690 IGP component is the Radeon X700. Like the RS485 component, RS690 will also be pin to pin compatible with RS482. An 8 pipeline (or even 4 pipeline) IGP should help improve performance quite a bit.

ATI will also relaunch their SB450 southbridge as SB460. Like RS482/RS485, SB460 will be based on the same die as SB450. The extremely low adoption of SB450 may have spurred ATI to rework some things on the chip, but from the documents we've read, SB460 and SB450 are exactly the same chip. A pin compatible SB600 will launch at the same time as RS690 as well.

Of course, for those of you who still are begging for more Crossfire, we mentioned a little bit about RD580 - ATI's Xpress 200 Crossfire successor - last week. RD580 sports 36 PCIe lanes for native dual x16 PEG adaptors - something NVIDIA has yet to duplicate on a single chip package. RD580 is also expected to launch before the end of this year, but the manufacturers we talked to are reluctant to adopt since many of them just invested heavily into RD480.

X1800 Master Cards

Internal documents from ATI reveal that X1800XT Crossfire Edition will not enter mass production until December 4th. Generally there is a four week lag between mass production and retail availability. Thus, do not expect to see X1800XT Master Cards this year. Currently, only X1800XL and X850 Pro Master Cards are available in retail channels.