Posted on Friday, December 18 2009 @ 20:22 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD has scheduled the launch of its Phenom II notebook processors for May 2010. The Danube platform will feature the RS880M chipset, the same one that is used by the Tigris platform, but it will feature the new SB820M southbridge. That chip supports fourteen USB 2.0 ports, two USB 1.1 ports, six SATA 6Gbps ports with RAID support, Gigabit Ethernet, and advanced clock generator. Unfortunately, the platform will not support USB 3.0.
It is noteworthy that at present AMD does not plan to release a chipset without integrated graphics for Danube: the AMD M870 (RX881) is only supported by current-generation Tigris platform. Obviously, notebook makers will still be able install discrete graphics processor into Danube notebooks. However, it is rather strange that AMD insists on integrated graphics on a platform that is intended to bring higher performance to the market. Perhaps, integrated graphics is needed in order to claim total support for general purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) by ATI Radeon graphics core via ATI Stream technology.
Most of AMD's Dunabe platform are based on the K10 architecture, but a couple of low-end models will stick with a K9-based core. You can find more details
at X-bit Labs.
