SerialATA Protocol and RAID 0 and 1 Arrays Support. New Intel chipsets will be equipped with a new South Bridge aka ICH5. It will differ from the ICH4 predecessors by bigger number of USB 2.0 ports (it will support 8 of them), and SerialATA support. It is remarkable but Intel didn’t implement ATA/133 protocol support in its ICH5 South Bridge tending to push the industry towards the newer and more convenient SerialATA interface (read more about SerialATA interface and its advantages in our Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V HDD Review).

ICH5 supports a pair of SerialATA-150 channels. It means that you can now connect to ICH5 up to 6 ATA devices (keeping in mind two ATA/100 channels inherited from the ICH4 predecessor). It is also very important to point out that ICH5 will be the world’s first South Bridge with the integrated RAID functions support. A special version of this bridge aka ICH5R (Intel 82801 ER), which will be only $3 more expensive than the regular version, will support RAID 0 (striping). Although you will be able to build up a RAID array only of SerialATA HDDs, you will be able to do it any time: no OS reinstallment is necessary.

In the future ICH5R will acquire enhanced features set. It should also start supporting RAID 1 (mirroring) arrays and Windows 2000. so far, RAID function from Intel will work only under Windows XP.

CSA (Communication Streaming Architecture) for Gigabit Ethernet. Since the times of i440LX and until recently North Bridges of almost all chipsets featured 4 buses: processor bus, memory bus, AGP bus and a bus between the North and the South Bridge. Today Intel added one more, fifth, bus to its new chipsets’ North Bridge.

This is a 256MB/sec bus, which is intended for CSA (Communication Streaming Architecture) implementation. It will serve to create high-speed gigabit network connections. The use of a special separate bus for network needs makes the processing of network requests very fast and unloads the CPU quite tangibly. Moreover, CSA allows all network controllers connected to it to work with the memory directly. Intel uses its PRO/1000 CT chip as a network controller within the CSA.

Intel Extreme Graphics 2 - Updated Integrated Graphics Core. Some new chipsets supporting processors with 800MHz bus will also feature an integrated graphics core. In fact, this will be the same Intel Extreme Graphics core, which we have already met in i845GE chipset. However, from now on it will work much faster. It will be achieved due to faster memory subsystem, which will be used by the graphics core for its needs, as well as due to higher working frequency of the graphics core itself.

AGP 8x Support. Following in the footsteps of all chipset manufacturers, Intel now realized the necessity of the AGP 8x graphics bus, because the graphics cards supporting it have already got very popular in the market. This way the new chipset will exchange data with the graphics subsystem at 2.1GB/sec.

Depending on the application field, new i875 and i865 chipsets will have a selected set of the above discussed innovations. Now let’s take a closer look at the two new chipset families and their representatives.

• Intel 875P. Intel targets this chipset for the High-End market segment and for use in the fastest PCs. That is why it will have no integrated graphics core, which is always replaced with a high-performance graphics cards in any high-end PC. All other new features, including PAT, are fully supported. Also we would like to point out that this chipset is the only one of all newcomers with ECC support.

• Intel 865PE. This is the younger brother of i875P, which is targeted for the mass market. It boasts all the same features, except PAT and ECC support.
• Intel 865G. This is a modification of i865PE with an integrated graphics core aka Intel Extreme Graphics 2.
• Intel 865P. This is a “lite” version of i865PE, which doesn’t support 800MHz processor bus.