The AMD-640 Chipset, from AMD's Platform Products Division, is the first product in a broad initiative by AMD to ensure the Socket 7 infrastructure supports feature sets at the leading edge of the marketplace over time. Enhancing the competitiveness of the Socket 7 infrastructure will provide PC manufacturers and resellers with the advantage of fast time to market. It will enable systems manufacturers to deliver differentiated, sixth-generation systems at an affordable cost using existing low-cost infrastructure.

"We intend to augment third-party solutions with AMD-developed chipsets that help optimize processor and system architectures and achieve the highest performance solutions in the Socket 7 infrastructure," said Vinod Dham, group vice president of AMD's Computation Products Group. "Our goal is to work with our chipset partners to ensure that our customers and the PC industry always have competitive chipset solutions contemporaneously with any competitive product."

Relationship with VIA Speeds Development, Time to Market
AMD's relationship with chipset partners includes a technology licensing agreement with VIA Technologies, Inc., of Fremont, CA. The partnership provided AMD with access to VIA's industry-leading technology as a basis for the AMD-640 Chipset, and enabled AMD to speed the product's development and time to market. VIA Technologies is the second-largest Socket 7 chipset supplier to motherboard manufacturers in Taiwan, and the third-largest Socket 7 desktop chipset supplier in the world.

"A partnership with a world-class supplier like AMD enables us to jointly deliver high-quality, high-performance chipsets for the PC marketplace," said Wen Chi Chen, president, VIA Technologies, Inc.

AMD is working with numerous other top-tier chipset suppliers through its FusionPCsm program to develop enhanced feature sets and ensure Socket 7 competitiveness now and in the future. AMD has received commitments from many partners to augment Socket 7 chipsets with support for an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). Chipset support for AMD processors is currently available from its FusionPC partners, including Acer Labs, ITE, National, Opti, SiS and VIA.

Key Features and Benefits
The AMD-640 Chipset includes the AMD-640 System Controller and the AMD-645 Peripheral Bus Controller. The AMD-640 System Controller is optimized for the AMD-K6 processor by incorporating support for SDRAM to deliver the highest transfer rate for main memory.

The AMD-645 Peripheral Bus Controller features Ultra DMA/33, the latest technology for the ATA/IDE interface providing a 33 MB/s high-speed transfer rate with added CRC to ensure integrity of data transfer. These high-performance features help accelerate the execution of multimedia applications.

The AMD-640 Chipset features ACPI to provide advanced power management and enable system design compliant with Microsoft's PC97 specification. The chipset also features a USB controller and Plug-N-Play support, allowing user-friendly installation of external peripherals in a system.

AMD's new chipset solution, combined with the AMD-K5 processor and the forthcoming AMD-K6 processor, also provides system designers with the flexibility to develop solutions that address a wide range of market segments and price points with a single motherboard design. This simplifies management of motherboard offerings and provides economies of scale. The integrated DRAM controller supports up to six 64-bit banks of FPM, EDO, or SDRAM with optional ECC to ensure data integrity. A single design can be configured with different memory technologies and capacities to address the price/performance ratios of the high-performance multimedia home PC, robust mission-critical commercial PC, or low-cost PC.

The new chipset is a highly integrated solution that reduces component count and board space requirements resulting in simpler and lower-cost designs. The AMD-640 System Controller uses an advanced 328 Ball Grid Array (BGA) package that provides enough I/O pins to integrate data buffers and cache tag comparators. The AMD-645 Peripheral Bus Controller is in a 208-pin PQFP package and integrates an ISA Bus Controller, Bus Master IDE controller, USB controller, PS/2-compatible keyboard/mouse controller and Real-Time Clock (RTC).

Pricing and Delivery
Sampling of the AMD-640 Chipset has commenced. Volume production and shipments will begin in the second quarter. The AMD-640 Chipset is priced at $30.60 each in 1,000-unit quantities.