Z97 motherboards and Haswell Refresh CPU’s may not have been a huge wave of innovation for the PC component market, but they did bring with the a couple of interesting features that can have a big impact on the world of storage. The first one being the ASRock Ultra M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 connection which was just announced, which effectively doubles its transfer speed bandwidth, leaving SATA 3 6GB/s looking like a dial-up connection in comparison.
The Ultra M.2 gets its big speed boost thanks to its direct connection to the CPU, older M.2 interfaces have to pass through their own chipset before heading to the CPU, which added latency and slowed things down. Now that latency is much lower and there is more performance on tap from the CPU.
“The theoretical speed of Ultra M.2 is 32Gb/s, which is 6X faster than PCIe x1 M.2, and 3X faster than PCIe x2 M.2. As for Ultra M.2 vs. normal M.2 comparison, we tested the read speed of Samsung XP941 PCIe x4 M.2 SSD on Ultra M.2 socket and reached 1.16GB/s, 46% faster than PCIe x2 M.2 socket. We also tested a PCIe x2 M.2 SSD on Ultra M.2 socket. Benefited from the direct linkage between Ultra M.2 interface and CPU, the PCIe x2 M.2 SSD read speed on Ultra M.2 socket is 8.8% faster than on normal M.2 socket. As shown in Chart 3, the lower latency of Ultra M.2 design does matter,” ASRock said in a release.
This new interface is currently only available on the ASRock Z97 Extreme 6 motherboard, which also comes equipped with Super Alloy technology, a 12 phase power design, Purity Sound 2, Dual LAN, SATA Express and ASRock Cloud. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any information on price at this time, but you can expect it to be a fairly big number.
Thank you TweakTown for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of TweakTown.
