ATI's Socket M2 CrossFire to come soon

The Inq reports AMD's upcoming Socket M2 which supports DDR2 memory won't see the light of the day until Q2 2006. But they also report chipset vendors are getting ready for the migration.

NVIDIA is aiming to sample their nForce 4 SLI chipset for Socket M2 by December and ATI has the RD580CF and a RD580C which support Socket M2 and CrossFire.

Both of ATI's chipsets have two by sixteen PCI Express slot graphics support and it's possible the chipset supports both DDR and DDR2 Athlon 64 processors.

The chipset samples are scheduled for December but it will be longer until we see the sample boards or the designs based on this socket M2 supporting chipset. It's mainly since the AMD delayed these CPUs and pushed them back to Q2 2006.

We are not sure that socket M2 will mean any performance increase since DDR 2 has horrible timings, but it’s the way AMD wants to go. It would be better of if it waited for DDR3 as this might have better timings and might actually run faster than the old DDR1. but before we see socket M2 RD580CF, we will see a socket 939 version of the chipset sometime in February time we recall.

More info at The Inquirer.