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Advanced Micro Devices will make the first chip set for its upcoming Hammer processor available during the fourth quarter, the company announced Thursday. Hammer is AMD's first family of 64-bit processors.

Chip sets are companion chips that handle much of the integration between the processor and the rest of the computer.

The AMD-8000 chip set series for the Hammer processor will initially include three chips: the AMD-8111 HyperTransport I/O hub, which is designed to replace the Southbridge chip used in Athlon chip set configurations; the AMD-8131 HyperTransport PCI-X tunnel, which offers two PCI-X bus bridges; and the AMD-8151 HyperTransport AGP3.0 graphics tunnel which support AGP-8X graphics.

The chip set is designed to be used in desktops, workstations, and servers, AMD says.

All three members of the AMD-8000 chip set series support AMD's HyperTransport chip interconnect technology, which supports a peak aggregate bandwidth of up to 12.8GB per second.

The "tunnel" function offered by the AMD-8131 and AMD-8151 allows downstream devices to be connected to the host via a HyperTransport connection, AMD says.

In addition to the AMD-8000, chip set vendors Acer Laboratories, Silicon Integrated Systems, NVidia, and Via Technologies are also expected to produce chip sets for Hammer.

Samples of ClawHammer, the first member of the Hammer series, are expected to begin shipping during the second quarter with volume shipments set to begin before the end of the year.

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