ATi CrossFire™ Xpress 3200 Chipset Dual PCIex16 Intro 1
Bluetooth 1 Mar 2006

ATi CrossFire™ Xpress 3200 Chipset (RD580)

Today, ATi officiaily announce the availability of boards based on its new ATi RD580 chipset. As you are probably aware, the RD480 was ATi's CrossFire answer to the Dual 8x PCIe platform. Although it is probably good enough for most users, bandwidth requirement for the high end graphics card seems to be the trend. RD580 is clear to challenge the NF4 SLIx16 as both are aiming for higher PCIe lanes. In this case, RD580 supports Dual 16X PCIe for CrossFire with a single chipset using Xpress Route.

From the chart, it can be seen that this platform uses a single chipset compared to competitng chipsets using two seperate chipsets linked using Hypertransport. Examples are the NF4 SLIx16 using C51+CK804 or the ULi M1697+M1695. The choice of a single chipset definitely reduces latency in the system. The high speed A-link NB to SB interface is also increased to 4 lanes compared to 2/4 on the Xpress 200 CrossFire platform.

In the next few pages, we extracted some numbers from the presentation to give you an idea how well the product scale across X1900, X1600 and X1300.

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