Report: Intel 9-Series Will Feature 10-16 Gb/s SATA Express

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

It appears that Intel's 9-Series chipsets will feature the SATA Express standard.

While Intel is still a little ways away from launching the Haswell series of CPUs and their chipsets, information has already surfaced about the 9-Series chipset, the chipset that will be released accordingly with the successor to the Haswell CPUs, the Broadwell CPUs.

What is known is that the Broadwell CPUs will also drop into the LGA1150 socket, just like the upcoming Haswell CPUs. From the information that has emerged, the 9-Series chipsets will come in two versions: the Z97, aimed at enthusiasts and power users; and the H97, aimed at the mainstream consumer. The systems will support both Haswell and Broadwell CPUs, making the transition from Haswell to Broadwell look remarkably similar as that from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge.

What's most remarkable about the 9-Series chipsets is that they will feature the upcoming SATA Express standard. While there is no information about how many of these connectors the 9-Series boards will have, it is definitely a warmly welcomed upgrade seen as modern SSDs are not far away from saturating the SATA3 standard.

The SATA Express standard will feature a bandwidth from 10 to 16 Gb/s.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

22 Comments Comment from the forums
  • amuffin
    THAT IS FAST!!!
    Reply
  • greghome
    So, is DDR4 coming to consumer motherboards on Hashwell, Haswell Shrink or Hashwell successor ?
    Reply
  • ojas
    LMAO now i want to wait for Broadwell :D

    But idk. Probably the only thing that'll make me stop with a Haswell purchase is DDR4 support for Broadwell, but i don't think that's happening. Not buying before december, so should have more details on the 9-series by then.
    Reply
  • ojas
    BTW, congrats Tom's, i haven't read this anywhere else on the sites i frequent for tech news (AnandTech, TechReport and DailyTech's news section since its feed appears on AT's home page).
    Reply
  • tlg
    I guess this means we will see SSDs being 2 times faster than the current ones with the coming of Z97, so maybe spending too much on an ssd now is not smart... something like a simple, cheap and still fast as a samsung 840?
    Reply
  • dimar
    How many SSDs are close to saturating SATA I when copying many small files?
    Reply
  • balister
    Looks like Intel is expecting a major jump in speed on SSDs. Right now, most SSDs are hitting around 5Gb which is still 1Gb shy of saturating Sata III. Evidently there are SSDs in the pipe that will be hitting 10Gb/s or higher in the next two years (about 1.25GB/s read speed).
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    10677736 said:
    So, is DDR4 coming to consumer motherboards on Hashwell, Haswell Shrink or Hashwell successor ?
    No point in asking that in a chipset thread when the memory controller is integrated in the CPU.

    If you want DDR4 on the desktop, you will have to wait for Broadwell (14nm shrink next year if all goes well) for that.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    10677881 said:
    How many SSDs are close to saturating SATA I when copying many small files?

    Just about all of them. SATA1 spec is only good for ~150MB/s, and while things like file transfers of small documents will be slower than that, anything moved that is bigger than an MP3, or transfered in a way other than a windows file transfer can go well above that very easily. Even SATA2 is easily saturated with mid-level SSDs. On my own rig I have Agility 3's and while their average speed sits right around the throughput of SATA2, if you give them compressible data then even they can max out the SATA3 spec with relative ease for reading files (ie loading programs or editing video).
    There is a lot of work that needs to be done to get SSDs to have more consistent fast performance, but it is good to know that some 2 years from now then we will be able to have the performance roof lifted again!


    It is nice to see that Haswell is benching better than expected numbers, and that Broadwell will probably see a good standards increase (DDR4, SATA4 are expected, but we may also see next gen Thunderbolt come to play as well). I'm still waiting on Skylake/Skymont for my next upgrade just due to my own upgrade cycle, but it is nice to see that Intel is not sacrificing everything on the alter of better power efficiency and that they are working on other areas of development.
    Reply
  • warezme
    I'm still rocking an X58 SLI with an OC'ed i7 on 1366 socket. Other than GPU updates every other year, replacing boot HD for SSD and maxing out the triple channel memory modules I haven't had much of a need to upgrade for nothing. I might consider one of these boards as a future upgrade plan depending on how OC'able they turn out to be. Looks interesting so far.
    Reply