Intel 9 series chipset has native SATA Express (SATA over PCIe) support

A Chinese tech site has posted a picture that reveals details on Intel's 9 series chipset. This chipset for Broadwell CPUs is the successor of the series 8 for Haswell CPUs which should become available in June this year. Broadwell CPUs and the 9 series chipset will likely hit the market in 2014.

The picture posted on the Chinese website VR-Zone appears to be a screenshot of a document that shows that Intel plans at least two chip-sets. The Z97 for high-end and the H97 chipset for mainstream users. The chipsets should also support Serial ATA Express, a new SATA standard.  SATA Express uses the PCI Express interface to transfer data. This should result in transfer rates between 8 Gbps and 16 Gbps and SATA Express should also be backwards compatible with previous standards.

SATA Express uses the SATA protocol over PCI Express (PCIe) lanes for additional speed. SATA Express (2 lanes PCIe 3.0) offers 3.3x the performance of SATA 3 (6Gb/s) with only 4% increase in power. SATA-IO the organisation behind the SATA specification is planning to finalize the SATA Express standard this year.

No posts to display