SATA III, USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0

truerock

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Jul 28, 2006
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I want my next motherboard to have SATA III, USB 3.0 and PCIe 3.0
Does anyone know when Intel will have a chipset that supports all 3?
I'm trying to plan out what type of upgrades to buy while I wait for the next big rev of motherboard standards.
 

truerock

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Yes, I've read about PCIe being delayed.
Maybe I could restate my question. When and what will be the Intel X58 chipset replacement and will it support SATA III, USB 3.0 and/or PCIe 3.0? I'm not hung-up on Intel, I'm just trying to get a feel for 2010. From what I have Googled, it looks like perhaps no major technology upgrades will happen to motherboards in 2010. Will 2010 be little different from 2009 motherboard wise?
 

MRFS

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ASUS has a work-around for SATA/6G on their latest P55 motherboards;
scroll down to the block diagrams here:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=769


Note, however, that there is still a theoretical bottleneck
at PCIe x1 Gen 2, which supports only 500MB/second
in each direction, whereas SATA/6G @ 10 bits per byte
supports 600 MB/second.

So, this workaround is not ideal, but it should make
a difference for the first crop of SSDs that will have
a 6G interface.

Seagate also have a Savvio 2.5" HDD model 15K.2 with SAS/6G support:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/savvio/savvio_15k.2/
but this is a 15,000 rpm rotating platter with a practical data rate
hovering around 150-160MB/second, directly under the read/write heads,
which is just now saturating SATA-I (150MB/second).


Hexus.net reports that ASUS is also developing
an add-on controller that supports SATA/6G,
using the same chips -- with probably the same
theoretical bottleneck of 500MB/second (as above):

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=19975


See also Intel's RAID controllers model RS2BL080
and RS2BL040 ("Big Laurel 8" and "Big Laurel 4"
respectively): these are enterprise-class SAS/6G
add-on controllers available now from Intel and
from LSI under the MegaRAID brand name:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sas-6gb-hdd,2392.html

Based on the published specs, these Intel RAID controllers
should work at max bandwidth in all existing x8 PCI-E 2.0 slots.


MRFS

 

AARRGGHHH

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I stumbled on this while looking for something else. But just to clarify, SATA III and USB 3 are available now, it appears vendors are implementing it by using some of the available PCIe 2.0 lanes.

ASUS' add on card uses an x4 slot, not the x1 that was proposed in the article above. It supports two SATA III and two USB 3 ports. It would require complete saturation of all 4 ports to saturate the x4 card, which seems somewhat unlikely ATM (IIRC, there's only 1 drive available that can even saturate a SATA II connection).

I am hung up (in a good way) on Intel, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the Intel chipset that will support USB 3, SATA III, and PCIe 3. Does anyone know if Intel has released any preliminary specs?