Intel May Feature SATA Express Interface In Their Intel 9-Series Chipset

In just 2 months from now, Intel would be launching their 4th Generation Core series ‘Haswell’ processor family followed by 8-Series ‘Lynx Point’ motherboard chips.

The 8 Series Lynx Point Chipset will be providing SATA III bandwidth on all 6 SATA ports. If looking at things with Intel’s current generation of motherboard chipsets, the 7th series chips can only support a combination of 2x SATA III ports.

But according to the roadmap VR-Zone Chinese edition provide, it seems that Intel is preparing 2 new chipset in the 9th Series lineup most likely to be introduced with ‘Broadwell’: Z97 to target enthusiasts and H97 made primarily for mainstream end-users.

The 9 Series maybe the first class of motherboard to feature SATA Express. There’s no clear information yet, but it seems that SATA Express is currently being drafted by the SATA I-O and classified under ‘SATA Rev 3.2’. SATA Express is a SATA link layer over the chipset’s PCIe channels, but it does maintain backward compatibility with existing and older SATA standards, but with reduced performance speed in comparison with this standard.

If this is true and if Intel does implement this on the 9 Series motherboards, SATA Express could provide 1000 MB/s of bandwidth throughput per direction for hard drives.

Via: Techpowerup!