Let’s face it. ATI is working hard at kicking butt and taking names. With their work on the Xpress 3200 core logic, they believe that they can make quick work of NVIDIA’s efforts with relative ease.

Later today, ATI will officially announce the Xpress 3200 core logic — a 110nm low-k core logic for AMD Socket 939 and the still unannounced Socket AM2. Xpress 3200 has all of the features found on Xpress 200 (RD480) with a few extra frills from the Southbridge including dual Gigabit Ethernet PHYs, dual 1394 PHYs and eight SATA 3.0Gbps drive support.

This is the first PC chipset to feature dual x16 PCIe lanes from a single core logic. ATI will follow up the RD580 launch with a slightly cheaper RD550 Xpress chipset within the next few months, but RD550 will not feature true dual x16 CrossFire found on the RD580. The documentation we have claims RD580 supports 36 total PCIe lanes; four of which are dedicated to the Southbridge interconnect. The remaining 32 are split 16 and 16 to the PCIe graphics adaptors for CrossFire support. Source: DailyTech

[tags]socket am2,ati xpress 3200,amd socket 939,sata 3.0gbps[/tags]