AMD Reveals 9-series Chipsets And Z-series Tablet APUs
AMD's turning in a banner year. The company really starting things off with a bang, as the Fusion chipset launched at CES and has continued to grow in popularity ever since. This week, the company's launching its 9-series chipset line, which aims to help PC builders to develop next generation high performance desktop platforms. The company also unveiled its 2011 HD Tablet Platform, based on the AMD Z-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), which looks to rival ARM-based alternatives as well as Intel in the market of Microsoft Windows-based tablets. And with Windows 8 being teased as well, this battle just got entirely more interesting.
The chipset is a key component of AMD’s next generation “Scorpius” desktop platform, which will also feature the 8-core “Zambezi” processor and AMD Radeon HD6000 series discrete graphics cards. The 9-series chipsets are the first to support the AMD AM3+ socket processors, while incorporating AM3 socket backwards compatibility. These boards enable blazing fast performance with support for AMD CrossFireX technology, which allows up to four AMD Radeon GPUs to co-process for incredible graphics uplift. In addition, these chipsets support clock rate management through AMD OverDrive software. Additionally, the 9-series chipset line-up features up to six SATA 3.0 6Gbps hard drive interface ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HyperTransport 3.0 technology, and PCI Express Generation 2.0 -- needless to say, this will certainly appeal to the bleeding edge sect.
The 9-series line of chipsets will be available from a variety of device manufacturers, including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, ECS, Foxconn Technology GIGABYTE Technology, Jetway and MSI. As for the tablet side of things? In addition to its deep integration with operating systems like Windows, the AMD 2011 HD Tablet Platform offers support for HTML 5, Adobe Flash 10.2 and external monitors -- the only question now is what companies are lining up at AMD's doorstep to put this into action? Hopefully we'll find out sooner rather than later.
The chipset is a key component of AMD’s next generation “Scorpius” desktop platform, which will also feature the 8-core “Zambezi” processor and AMD Radeon HD6000 series discrete graphics cards. The 9-series chipsets are the first to support the AMD AM3+ socket processors, while incorporating AM3 socket backwards compatibility. These boards enable blazing fast performance with support for AMD CrossFireX technology, which allows up to four AMD Radeon GPUs to co-process for incredible graphics uplift. In addition, these chipsets support clock rate management through AMD OverDrive software. Additionally, the 9-series chipset line-up features up to six SATA 3.0 6Gbps hard drive interface ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HyperTransport 3.0 technology, and PCI Express Generation 2.0 -- needless to say, this will certainly appeal to the bleeding edge sect.
The 9-series line of chipsets will be available from a variety of device manufacturers, including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, ECS, Foxconn Technology GIGABYTE Technology, Jetway and MSI. As for the tablet side of things? In addition to its deep integration with operating systems like Windows, the AMD 2011 HD Tablet Platform offers support for HTML 5, Adobe Flash 10.2 and external monitors -- the only question now is what companies are lining up at AMD's doorstep to put this into action? Hopefully we'll find out sooner rather than later.
