ATI has formally renamed its Radeon Xpress 200 chipset to CrossFire Xpress 1600, the company's website reveals. Such a move had been anticipated - a number of motherboard makers have already begun cutting and pasting the new name into existing product documentation.

The Xpress 1600 supports a pair of 8x PCI slots for co-operative GPUs and hooks them up to either an Intel processor and main memory, or to an AMD processor and its built-in memory controller.

The chipset's South Bridge component plays host to eight USB 2.0 ports, up to seven PCI slots, four parallel ATA 133 drives, two Serial ATA drives that can be run in RAID 0 and 1 configurations and an HD audio sub-system. It also provides support for Trusted Platfrom Module 1.1 and 1.2.

The chipset's core component is the RD480, RD481 or RD482 North Bridges, all of which can form the basis for CrossFire Xpress 1600 motherboards. The recently released RD580 powers ATI's CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset, which supports two 16x PCI Express graphics cards.

ATI is expected to unveil is SB600 South Bridge chip in May. Its upcoming HDMI-enabled RD600 and RS600 chipsets - their go-to-market name remains unknown, though it's clearly going to be CrossFire Xpress something - are believed to be set to ship in June. ®

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