Introduction

ATI, the company that is most known of their powerful and quality graphic card solutions, released their first Crossfire mainboard chipset with the RD480. Today they present the new RD580 chipset. So let's take a look what the new chipset has to offer.

Naming

Most of you already heard about "RD580" which is a sequence to RD480. The D stands for "Dual" PCI-Express video card slots. There are no plans to have an RS580 (integrated VGA) or RX580 (only one video card slot).

If you talk to the chipset development team at ATI everybody just calls RD580 by the name "Skeletor". Maybe you played with Masters of the Universe "He-Man" toys as a child. Then you probably remember Skeletor as the arch-enemy of the hero He-Man. Previous chipsets had engineering names like "Metallo" and "Superman". Guess you can imagine what ATI chipset gurus were interested in when they were young.

As marketing name ATI picked "ATI Crossfire XPRESS3200". The 32 obviously stands for the 32 available graphics lanes. Sixteen lanes for every video card no matter if running with one video card or in Crossfire mode.Quick fact: ATI's chipset business made up 10% of their revenues last quarter with an expected growth to 23%

Who's XPRESS3200 for?

When you're taking a closer look at the picture above, you can clearly see that ATI is aiming their new chipset at extreme overclockers and hardcore gamers.

A lot of design time went into "overspeccing" the chipset. All silicon is engineered not only to work at spec but at about 30% above as well. You are basically guaranteed to overclock 30% without the need to increase voltages or cooling. ATI also had a very tight testing setup: 1.2V -5%, slow process and 120°C operating temperature. Only if the chipset was stable at these parameters it would be accepted.

Northbridge

• Smallest northbridge die in the market at 39mm² (22 million transistors)
• Manufactured on TSMC's 0.11um process node
• TDP 8 Watts

Good old saying is right here, a picture tells you more than thousand words. Size of the chipset die is very small. Smaller footprint means more chips per die, which means it is also cheaper to produce.

The reduced heat output of 7-8 Watts will greatly help integration in Media PC and Home Entertainment Systems. With such a tiny heat load you can easily get away with a small (and cheap) passive heatsink. There is no increased noise and the simple heatsink construction does not require funky cooling technologies like heatpipes to stay quiet.Quick fact: Shipped ATI chipsets in Q4/2005: Almost 7,000,000.