AMD is keeping the lid on when it comes to Llano and Bulldozer, and barely no details has leaked to the media. VR-Zone got a glimpse of AMD's test motherboard for Llano and decided to take a picture where we see some thing that should please many of home builders.
The motherboard on the picture does not represent the design of any retail board but is an internal board built for testing the new Llano architecture, which also explains why it is one of the most Spartan boards we've seen in a very long time. The board looks to have almost anything you could wish for thanks to the new southbridge or FCH (Fusion Controller Hub) as AMD calls it. The biggest news with the southbridge is integrated support for four USB 3.0 ports, which makes AMD the first offer native support for the latest USb standard.
We still don't know what kind of performance to expect from Llano, but it looks like it has been decided how what the new chipset will look like, which is a single chip since the northbridge is now in the CPU. This further reduce costs for AMD and eventually a lower retail price. This something Intel was emphasizing 1.5 year ago with the launch of Socket 1156.
The most interesting with this picture is the mounting holes that reminds a lot of Socket AM3. It even looks to be drawn on the board to support the new mounting clip for AM3+, which means compatibility with AM2/AM2+/AM3 and new AM3+ coolers. A small detail for some, but very important for those who build their own systems since they can continue using the same cooler from the previous system.
