AMD will finally launch a new DirectX 10.1 based chipset but unfortunately, this won't happen at least until May 2010.

The currently available AMD 790GX has DirectX 10 core inside and it's quite an effort to swap the old core and integrate the new one. That is why AMD takes its time to upgrade to DirectX 10.1 with AMD 890GX chipset and only in 2011 with Llano it plans to get DirectX 11 core in a mainstream graphics core.

The graphics core on AMD 890GX should work at 700MHz like the HD 3300 core on the 790GX, and for 22W TDP Northbridge this is quite a good clock speed. As you can imagine 890 GX graphics are based on a crippled version of the RV710 graphics core and therefore it supports UVD 2.

The launch date should be May, but we expect motherboards based on it to start showing around Computex 2010 that kicks off in first week of June 2010.