14 DAY TRIAL // In the first quarter of 2012, AMD is rumored to update its chipset lineup with a new Fusion Controller Hub (FCH) that improves the specs of its predecessor by adding support for the company's upcoming APUs and a wider range of storage features.
Compared to the A75 FCH used in today's high-end FM1 motherboards for Llano APUs, the A85FX, as the new chipset is reportedly dubbed, will add support for RAID 5 and will increase the number of available SATA 6Gbps ports from six to eight.
The rest of the chipset specifications will be carried over from the current A75, so the A85FX is expected to offer a total of 16 USB ports.
As most of you have guessed by now, four of these will support the USB 3.0 standard, while the remaining 12 are split between 10 USB 2.0 ports and two USB 1.1 ports.
These are joined by support for CrossFireX dual-GPU setups, RAID 0, 1, and 10 operation modes, as well as by DisplayPort and VGA video outputs.
The AMD chipset also provides four second generation PCI Express lanes for connecting various other add-on cards.
Just as mentioned previously, AMD designed the A85FX in order to support the company's next-generation APU platform, dubbed Comal.
Alongside the new chipset, this will also include the A-Series Trinity APUs, that are to be released in 2012 and are expected to be 50% more powerful that the A-Series Llano APUs launched in mid-June.
Much of this power comes from the inclusion of Bulldozer x86 CPU cores, which will be paired together with an updated DX11 GPU architecture.
The Bulldozer cores used in Trinity will go by the code name of Piledriver and, much like the current Llano processors, will lack any sort of Level 3 cache memory as AMD wanted to increase the die area available to the on-board GPU. (via Fudzilla)