More details have surfaced about AMD's chipset that goes along with socket AM3+ and their Bulldozer cpus, all told it looks like a major step up, beating SandyBridge in a few different areas chipset wise, the main area being the amount of PCIe lanes available for GPUs and other things.

Given what I know about the 9xx series AMD chipset, as well as having studied a photo of the AM3+ socket, I believe the following:

1) Bulldozer (AM3+) CPUs will almost certainly not fit socket AM3 motherboards.

2) AM3 CPUs will most likely fit AM3+ motherboards.

3) Bulldozer looks to be a good platform for Crossfire, with two full 16x PCIe slots AND another eight lanes for other componants.

Hopefully the Bulldozer CPUs themselves will live up to expectations, and we can have a Grand CPU Battle again, like back in the early 2000s.

"The FX chipset is as usual the top model and offers full bandwidth for two graphics cards in CrossFire. The chipsets also gain support for IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management Unit) a function that translates virtual addresses to physical addresses and will be used for demanding I/O virtualization. Exactly how AMD will use it isn't entirely certain though.

If we look to the southbridges it will improve performance between it and the northbridge, while also adding SATA 6.0 Gbps and RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 (5 only in SB950). With full speed over Express 2.0 both storage controller and USB 3.0 circuits will get beter bandwidths to work with, which should improve performance over current solutions."

Source: Nordichardware

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