A new motherboard chipset family officially makes its way into the market from AMD today, this being their IGP equipped 690-series. Available in two variants, there is the RS690-based mainstream AMD 690G with ATI Radeon X1250 graphics, and the RS690C-based value AMD 690V with ATI Radeon X1200 graphics, both sporting HDMI support which would make them ideal in a HTPC environment.

Though the curtain hasnt actually been lifted just yet, the DailyTech have posted up full details on these already, along with pictures of some of the boards from varying partners.

And no doubt there'll be plenty more to come from various sources in the way of benchmarks and comparison tests, if enough of 'em surface i'll post up a 690 series review roundup for ya'll.

AMD's 690-family hit plenty of snags along its development cycle. Early roadmaps showed a 2H'2006 launch, however, AMD kept pushing the launch back. Motherboard vendors blamed the delayed launch on AMD for multiple delays with the RS690. AMD's discrete RX690 variant that was to launch in the same timeframe as RS690 has yet to make an appearance.

The integrated ATI Radeon X1250 and X1200 graphics cores are identical, in terms of 3D capabilities. Although the ATI Radeon X700-series provides the foundation for the ATI Radeon X1250/X1200 IGP, it is a neutered derivative. The ATI Radeon X1200-family IGP features two pixel-pipelines and two vertex-shaders. Unlike some ATI Radeon X1000-series GPUs, the pixel-pipelines have not been decoupled - the ATI Radeon X1200-family only has two pixel-shaders. AMD specifies a 400 MHz GPU-core clock for reference designs.