ICH6
ICH6 was Intel's first PCI Express southbridge. It made four PCI Express ×1 ports available. Faster ×16-Ports were accommodated in the MCH. The bottleneck Hub interface was replaced by a new Direct Media Interface (in reality a PCI Express ×4 link) with 1 GB/s per direction. Support for Intel High Definition Audio was included. In addition, AC'97 and the classical PCI 2.3 were still supported.
Two additional SATA ports were added, and one PATA channel was removed. The ICH6R variant supported RAID modes 0, 1, 0+1 and the Intel specific "Matrix RAID".
ICH6R and ICH6-M implemented AHCI SATA controllers for the first time. The chips had 652 pins. Originally Intel had planned to bring two further variants under the names ICH6W and ICH6RW to the market, which should contain a software Access Point for a Wireless LAN. These chips are published.
This has the following variants:
- 82801FB (ICH6) Base
- 82801FR (ICH6R) RAID
- 82801FBM (ICH6M) Base Mobile
- 6311ESB (ESB2) Enterprise Southbridge
- 6321ESB (ESB2) Enterprise Southbridge with integrated LAN for embedded
Read more about this topic: I/O Controller Hub