ON FRIDAY WE gave you a closer look at AMD’s mobile chipsets for the Fusion platform and today we’ll look a little bit closer at the desktop chipsets. Again we’re looking at three different Hudson models, although this time things are a little bit different on the entry level compared to the mobile chipsets.
The Hudson-D1 – where D of course stands for desktop – is intended to work with both AMD’s entry level Llano processors as well as for Ontario, in the latter case, specifically for small form factor embedded consumer systems. Unlike all the other Hudson chipsets, this model only supports SATA 3Gbps unless AMD has changed its mind since this information was put together. The rest is more or less identical to the mobile Hudson M1 chipset, although the desktop version adds support for up to four PCI slots/devices.
The Hudson-D2 which is the mid-range chipset for the Llano processors offers a slightly better feature set, although again similar to the Hudson-M2. The main difference here compared to the mobile counterpart is some new SATA features such as support for RAID 10 and FIS-based switching which is a feature which allows for commands to be sent and received from any drive at any time, a useful feature in a multi-hard drive system where a lot of data is being shuffled between drives. It also has support for up to three PCI slots/devices, one less than the entry level chipset.
Finally the high-end Hudson-D3 has all of the features of the Hudson-D2 plus support for four USB 3.0 ports. Interestingly it appears that the Hudson-D2 and D3 supports the integrated SD controller, a feature you don’t usually see in desktop chipsets. A common feature between all three desktop chipsets is that they appear to use a faster chipset interconnect as well, presumably using four PCI Express gen 2 lanes, compared to four gen 1 lanes for the mobile chipsets. This makes sense as you generally have more devices connected to a desktop chipset compared to a notebook chipset.
We’ll have to wait and see as to what changes AMD might do to the platforms before they launch, but this is the most up to date information we’ve seen about the new chipsets. This time around AMD has managed to keep the lid on things, although we’d expect a lot more information to leak once the motherboard manufacturers get their hands on some initial chipset and processor samples and hopefully we’re not too far from that happy occassion.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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