Of course, this announcement plays a marketing role in the first place, because the mass production of AMD-8000 will start only in Q4’02, together with the launching of the new ClawHammer processor. That is why there are hardly any specific details about this chipset revealed to the public so far. In fact, the press-release mentioned just the component parts of the chipset, and that’s it: AMD-8111 HyperTransport I/O hub, AMD-8131 HyperTransport PCI-X tunnel and AMD-8151 HyperTransport AGP3.0 graphics tunnel (the memory controller is located in the CPU, as you know). And of course, AMD couldn’t help mentioning that they worked very closely with other chipset developers such as ALi, SiS, NVIDIA and VIA, which will for sure work out some solutions for Hammer processors.
Well, that’s about it. We would only like to mention that as we have already told you here, AMD is planning to showcase the first ClawHammer samples in the middle of March at CeBIT this year. If AMD shows this CPU at work, then it most likely work together with a AMD-8000 chipset. Maybe then we will get some additional information about both.





