AMD’s upcoming RX780 chipset, the little brother of the RD790 has now been approved by the PCI SIG and is now even closer to be released, in advance to Phenom’s arrival. The RX780 will basically be a RD790 with less PCIe lines and will only have one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot. The ‘lower-end’ chipset will still support every AM2+ CPU and will feature the new HyperTransport 3.0, will have DDR2-1066 support and will be initially paired up with the SB600 southbridge.

AMD has pushed back the release of its new chipset line-up so it will come just before it starts shipping Phenom processors, something that is likely to happen in December. The bulk of the Phenom series (Phenom X4, X3 and X2) will be released in Q1 2008.