AMD finally announced ATI RS690 chipset and decided to rename it to AMD 690. It comes in two flavours AMD 690G as a fancier integrated part and AMD 690V as a cheaper integrated part. The V stands for value.
Both AMD 690 chipsets supports AMD Sempron, AMD Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 FX and X2 CPU's based on AM2 socket.
AMD 690G chipset is more video based so it has two video outs that can operate simultaneously. You can choose two from VGA/DVI, TV-out or dual link capable DVI/HDMI, while the AMD 690V has the VGA outs only.
Graphics engine is a renamed X700 with some additional features. Radeon X700 based integrated graphics got a X1250 name for 690G and X1200 on 690V. The first reports say that its performance can be compared to X1300 discrete parts.
This is the first chipset on the market with four pipelines. It also has AVIVO video engine which is the same one you can see on high end video cards. The video quality should be good. ATI claims that it can play HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs if you have a dual core CPU, and that is yet to be seen.
With the announcement of AMD 690, ASUS released two boards, M2A-VM HDMI and M2A-VM, both of them on AMD 690G chipset. Both of them should be great for building an HTPC and only difference is that one has HDMI and FireWire while the other is left without them.
