Several years ago, the most important motherboard chipset makers kept a tight collaboration with Intel and AMD. But at one point, things started to get a little bit out of hand. It’s known that Intel was relying more and more on its own chipsets rather than VIA’s and NVIDIA’s, but AMD clearly needed some helping hand with motherboard chipsets. Nowadays, things are not different at all for Intel, while AMD has slowly started to build its own chipsets, knowing that it can do better than VIA and NVIDIA, especially after it managed to finalize the ATI acquisition.

The upcoming 790GX chipset is AMD/ATI’s in house solution to their Hybrid CrossfireX technology. Weeks away from the official launch, a Chinese website is now releasing some more information about the architecture behind the 790GX. We found out that it supports a local frame buffer, just as the 780G. However, the motherboard integrators didn’t really care about the local frame buffer in the past, because of the increased production cost, so history could repeat as well with the 790GX.

The Chinese source managed to take a closer look at a 790GX-powered Unika motherboard that integrates a DDR2 memory chip from Hynix as a local frame buffer. It’s not much, but in a hybrid configuration it is supposed to add to the overall system performance, as the integrated GPU doesn't have to share system memory in Windows and the frame buffer is faster than sharing system memory when you're playing games using the IGP. Moreover, the 790GX-powered motherboards will include an improved graphics core, supposedly the Radeon HD 3300.

As I previously stated, it looks like we are going to see improved AMD/ATI products more often now, but that doesn’t mean our wallet is going to like this perspective.

Intel seems to be happy with its new Atom CPU series, but sometimes the competition hits hard, leaving you in awe. Even though Intel prepared what they thought was a good platform for their Atom series, they have ultimately admitted that SiS might have a better solution.

I’m not saying that SiS is really the supreme competitor for Intel, it’s clear that the Asians have collaborated with Intel at some point in the past. That’s why Intel was impressed with the new SiS platform and it’s now promoting it. So Intel will most likely forget about its own platform and delegate SiS to take care of the Atom series on the motherboard side. Thus, Intel acknowledges the true power of the SiS671/968 chipset combination for Nettop motherboards.

What’s so special about this solution, anyway? First of all, SiS managed to pull a rating of only 8W compared to Intel’s 22W 945GC chipset, which is a relatively old chipset modified to suit the new Atom family. Furthermore, Intel allowed the inclusion of DVI support on this platform, which opens up some new possibilities for those oriented towards an HTPC platform.

Other interesting new features are the 5.1-channel HD audio capability, the support for up to two PCI slots and a single x1 PCIe slot. These facts point out that Intel might be up for some larger mATX boards for Nettop, while still concentrating on the mini-ITX boards, as shown at IDF Shanghai.

One of the factors that lead to a bad view of their microprocessors in early to mid 1990s was the fact that AMD allowed virtually anyone to manufacture mainboards for them, while chipsets were also designed and manufactured without being closely supervised by AMD engineers, and this lead to the existence on the market of a lot of instable boards that lead people into thinking AMD processors were the problem. Now, it seems AMD and Intel are pushing their own processors and chipsets, sometimes assorted with their own integrated graphics processors too, and in less than two years we'll have full AMD or full Intel platforms, this leaving NVIDIA outside the chipset market...


Well, since NVIDIA can't simply let go, they made a very smart move, deciding to offer core-logic for VIA's processors. According to various reports, NVIDIA is set to offer chipsets for VIA's Isaiah processors, but while this hasn't been officially confirmed yet, we can't bet on it.

The tricky part of the whole deal is that, if the rumors are true, VIA will stop producing chipsets for its own processors, while S3, wholly-owned VIA subsidiary, will continue to design and manufacture discrete graphics chips (anyway, as long as they are not going to sell them in any other place than the official page, I don't see S3 grabbing back the market share lost, unless they are going to release a killer card with perfect drivers and low price...).

For now, NVIDIA and VIA are quiet regarding this matter, so I can't really say what's going to happen, but with the desktop and mobile market in AMD and Intel's hands, moving in the low cost area may be a wise decision for NVIDIA.

Despite the fact today another week of work comes to an end for a lot of people, for computer hardware stores, this is a big day. Two different series of products, coming from two companies that have been fighting each other for decades, have just begun shipping. The companies are Intel and AMD, as you probably figured out already, and the products...we'll see right away!

Despite the fact I am an AMD fan and I don't have any reason to hide it, I will start with Intel's part of the story. Some of the big mainboard manufacturers have just started shipping their products using the Intel X48 chipset, despite the fact this chipset wasn't officially revealed by Intel yet!

We're talking about ASUS and Gigabyte, and while retail stores all over the world may start selling them by the end of the month, Taiwanese and Japanese ones may have these products available earlier, even by the end of the week.

This new platform features dual-channel DDR3 1333MHz support (producers may also choose to support DDR3 1600MHz memory, although Intel decided not to offer support for it), a 1600MHz processor system bus, PCI Express 2.0 with multi-GPU capability, and excellent overclocking abilities. This should be it for now, but I am sure we'll find out more as these boards will start arriving in various hardware reviewers' computers...

Next topic - AMD's hot products. While not quite that hot, but expected by a lot of people, the triple-core AMD Phenom-8000 series are already on their way to the large computer manufacturers!

While these new processors won't take the performance crown from Intel, they are some nice additions to AMD's current product portofolio. These are the Phenom 8450 and 8650 models, running at 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz, with 1.5MB L2 cache, and 2MB L3 cache, but AMD didn't confirm these specifications yet.

These being said, let's wait until Dell and HP update their web pages with new systems using these new processors from AMD, but since not even AMD's online price list doesn't have these models included yet, I guess we'll have to wait at least a few weeks until that happens...

Despite the fact Intel's upcoming chipset, X48, got delayed, we already got some interesting news about a high-end motherboard that's going to use it. The most interesting fact is we're talking about MSI, and not ASUS or Gigabyte, which are usually closer to Intel, but this also makes me think what I have here may be nothing more but rumors. Anyway, these being said, let's see what do we know...

What you can see in the image above is a part of the HydroGen waterblock designed by MSI to be used with its high end Intel X48-based motherboards. The full-copper block is made in Germany, and there are absolutely no barbs included. Since all you'll have here are simply threaded sockets, you can use the same barb size you used for the rest of your system's liquid cooling circuit, keeping an optimal flow to ensure best cooling possible.

According to sources from MSI, the X48 motherboards to use this should have a power efficiency increased with 20 percent, while their lifespan is expected to be six times longer, due to lower temperatures achieved(I wonder who's going to use such a board for longer than 3-4 years, being given the "faster, faster, fasteeer!" tendency in the hardware world).

At this time, this design is not yet complete, but the price estimations place MSI's X48 motherboards featuring the HydroGen system somewhere in the $500-$600 area, so be sure I'll keep my eyes on MSI and tell you all there is to know about this topic, as soon as something new pops up!