According to leaked slides over at Chinese VR-Zone site, we now know that Intel's next-generation 9-series chipset will have native support for the Serial ATA Express interface bringing up to 16Gbps transfer speeds, an impressive boost over the 6Gbps that we have with SATA III today.

Although we are yet to see Intel's 8-series chipset aim for use with upcoming next-gen Haswell CPUs, Intel is already talking about its newest 9-series chipset aimed to launch in 2014. According to early information, the 9-series chipset will bring native support for Serial ATA Express, an interface based on PCI-Express protocol that will bring some impressive transfer speeds.

For now we know that we will see the Z97 and H97 chipset aimed at enthusiast and mainstream markets and both will feature native SATA Express support, Intel Device Protection with Boot Guard as an enhanced platform as well as Intel Smart Response and Rapid start technologies for dynamic cache sharing.

The new PCIe/SATA connector concept will accept a x2 PCIe, x1 PCIe or two SATA cables and offer SATA cost/performance benefits by requiring a connector that supports both SATA and PCIe, thus allowing a single motherboard connector to support both interfaces. The new SATA Express connector will, of course, be backward compatible with current SATA cables.

In case you missed it, the Intel 9-series chipset will arrive next year with the launch of next-gen Broadwell CPUs made on a 14nm manufacturing process.





Source: XBitlabs.com.