Despite previous reports that indicated AMD platforms would have to do without PCI Express for the rest of the year, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

ATI has yet to announce its PCI Express chipsets, however the company CEO, David Orton revealed during ATI’s fiscal-fourth-quarter conference call that chips were already shipping to manufacturers.

ATI is the first company to ship PCIe-enabled core-logic chipsets for the AMD K8 platform, and this will be its first chipset offering for an AMD processor platform. The company is offering two K8 chipsets, the RX480 discrete chipset, and the RX480 integrated part. ATI will also launch the RS400 integrated chipset for Intel's Pentium 4 platform. The integrated graphics will support DirectX 9.0.

Although it usually takes a delay from the moment chipsets are shipping and manufacturers actually get products out in store shelves, more than likely other chipset makers such as VIA, SiS and NVIDIA are hard at work pushing its own products out of the door in order to make it into the 4th quarter.