Japanese partners of Sapphire and ATI Technologies are demonstrating a mainboard powered by ATI’s RADEON 9100 IGP core-logic from Sapphire this week in a Tokyo store. Sources indicate that the commercial products based on ATI’s third generation chipset product will be available as early as later this month.

The RADEON 9100 IGP and its mobile brethren MOBILITY RADEON 9100 IGP support all desktop and mobile Intel Socket 478/479 processors with 400, 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with or without Hyper-Threading technology and including the upcoming Prescott CPUs.

The 9100 IGP chipset feature dual-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory support providing up to 6.40GB/s of peak memory bandwidth and up to 4GB of DDR SDRAM main memory. The biggest advantage of the RADEON 9100 IGP is probably its graphics core that is based on the RADEON 9200 architecture and supports DirectX 8.1 features in addition to HyperZ technologies to ensure graphics memory bandwidth is used more efficiently.

The indisputable trump of all ATI Technologies’ graphics chips is 2D and video features, since the RADEON 9100 IGP inherited every single capability supported by higher-end parts. ATI’s 9100 IGP integrated core-logic products offer 2 independent 300MHz RAMDACs supporting up to 2048x1536@32bit resolutions. Besides, RADEON 9100 IGP and MOBILITY RADEON 9100 IGP offer advanced integrated TV-Out encoder and video engines supporting up to 1024x768 resolutions. Flat-panel support includes LVDS interface and external TMDS.

According to the presently available reports, the Sapphire mainboard that is demonstrated now will debut on the 28^th of October in retail at $115 price-point. The cost is not that low given that the product is an entry-level solution without any substantial advantages besides dual-channel memory and DirectX 8.1 graphics.

Anyway, watch out for the late October since there are more RADEON 9100 IGP products coming from other mainboard makers as well.