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ICH5 to Come Soon. The Next Stop is PCI Express!
Posted 10/28/02 at 5:09 pm by Anton

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1035842956

As we know, the next I/O controller after the current ICH4 will be the ICH5 that is due next year. The newcomer will not bring us something extraordinary new: just a couple of Serial ATA-150 channels and up to eight USB 2.0 ports. A lot more interesting device is the next to the ICH5: the ICH6 with some brand new features and capabilities, as I have read over here.

The ICH6 will come in April 2004 and will probably be the part of Intel’s dual-channel DDR-II memory supporting chipset. To tell you the truth, this core-logic is amazingly interesting, considering all its innovations. Firstly, it will be 2004, the year when the successor of the PCI-bus will come: the PCI Express. The interconnection protocol will probably be here for another decade or even a bit more, so, it will probably be very interesting to try it first in 2004. I am not sure that Intel will implement the PCI-Express based bus for graphics cards in 2004, however, I believe that by 2004 there will be numerous devices for PCI Express slot. Secondly, DDR-II will become mainstream some times in 2004 – you can find more details about the matter here. Finally, the fastest NetBurst based CPU, the code-named Tejas processor will hit the 6.0GHz mark in the year 2004, providing extreme performance (see this news-story) and utilising the most powerful types of memory. As you see, the evolution will continue to run forwards in the coming years, hence, there will be a lot of interesting to witness. As for the I/O capabilities of the ICH6, the main feature of the chip probably are four PCI Express ports: one for the interconnection between MCH and ICH and another three for some other purposes. Of course, there will also be two Serial ATA controllers, eight USB 2.0 ports and improved sound-core from Intel.

Even more powerful ICH7 and ICH8 are to come in 2005 and 2006 respectively. There is almost no information about these chips, however, we can expect that USB 3.0, DSL, WLAN to be supported.

As you see, there are a lot of exciting things to come in future.

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