ATI has announced its anticipated South Bridge chip, the SB600, the chipset component designed to limit the company's dependence on ULi, the chip maker now owned by ATI's arch-rival, Nvidia.

The SB600 hooks up to ATI's Xpress 3200, 1600 and 1100 North Bridge chips. It can support up to four 1.5Gbps or 3Gbps Serial ATA drives which can be configured in RAID 0, 1 or 10 modes. A single parallal ATA channel is included for Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 peripherals.

The chip can host ten USB ports and up to six PCI slots. But while the part offers HD audio with support for four codec chips, multiple independent I/O streams and S/P DIF digital connections, ATI's description of the product is oddly empty of references to networking, Gigabit or otherwise - surprising given the SB600's support for other business PC-friendly technologies, such as Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and remote management.

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ATI also announced today Socket AM2 incarnations of its Xpress 3200 and 1100 chipsets. ®

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