Motherboard Chipsets

Bye Bye, North Bridge

It used to be that the CPU north bridge was the star of the core-logic chipset world. With its jurisdiction over RAM, the north bridge’s speed had a significant impact on performance.

But with AMD and now Intel integrating the memory controller into the CPU, the north bridge’s importance just got a whole lot smaller. That’s not to say it doesn’t still have some use. The north bridge contains the circuitry connecting the motherboard to the graphics cards, and the south bridge as well; in integrated graphics boards, the north bridge also contains a GPU core.

Next year, however, the north bridge’s role will be further diminished. AMD is expected to integrate a GPU into the core of its CPUs due next year, and Intel will move graphics and direct-attach PCI-E into the CPU. That pretty much means the end of the north bridge as we’ve known it all these years.

SLI For All

Next year, we’ll get something we’ve long pined for: the ability to run both CrossFire and SLI on a motherboard without the need for extra hardware. The change comes from Nvidia’s flip-flop regarding SLI support on motherboards that use Intel’s X58 chipset. Originally, Nvidia said it would allow SLI only if motherboard vendors integrated a pricey and hot nForce 200 chip into the PCB to “enable” SLI. When board vendors balked, Nvidia decided to enable SLI on X58 boards the company has “certified” for SLI use. The company says that an nForce 200 chip is still recommended for best performance in configs consisting of more than two cards, but not required.

End Of nForce?

With VIA officially calling it quits, Nvidia is the only third-party chipset vendor still shooting live rounds. But what about in 2009? On Intel, it’s open for debate. Nvidia has said it believes it has a license to build chipsets for Core i7, but Intel has said that’s not quite true. One thing is certain: Nvidia will not have a chipset for the LGA1366-based Core i7 CPU at all, but the company is planning one for LGA1066 CPUs when they’re released later next year. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether Nvidia can do this without a lawsuit from Intel—and with graphics and PCI-E integration slated for Intel’s LGA1066 CPUs, what would even be the point?

Hard Drives

Perpendicular And Patterned-Recording Technologies Will Face Off

Perpendicular recording has allowed industry giants to push the bounds of drive capacities, with Seagate now leading the pack at 1.5 terabytes. But that trend won’t last forever. Hitachi officials believe they can take perpendicular recording all the way up to an areal density of one terabit per square inch—modern drives hover around 300 to 400Gb per square inch. But by 2010, new storage technologies could take hold.

Most promising is patterned media recording. It allows drive makers to overcome the thermal stability issues that plague perpendicular recording. When a manufacturer wants to increase the areal density of a drive, it shrinks the small bits of magnetic material, or grains, on the drive’s platter. The smaller these grains get in a perpendicular-recording format, the more likely they are to become thermally unstable—switching their magnetization spontaneously and, thus, scrambling the data they store.

Patterned media recording carves actual grooves onto the platter in the form of tracks or individual bits. The latter can be thought of as a swarm of magnetic islands. Each island stores a single bit of information that’s represented by a number of grains magnetized in a particular direction. The size of these grains can be reduced, and the overall areal density of the drive increased, because the magnetic noise from each island of grains is unable to affect others.

Hard drive manufacturers are considering two other storage technologies that would similarly reduce the thermal instabilities between grains. Thermally assisted recording, or heat-assisted magnetic recording, increases the stiffness of the grains to prevent unintended magnetization. The drive head uses a miniscule near-field aperture laser to heat the grains. This allows their magnetization to be switched, representing a change in the data bit. The same goes for the second storage technology: microwave-assisted magnetic recording. Only in this case, the laser is replaced by a small device that can emit a radio frequency magnetic field.

USB 3.0

New Spec Promises A Speed Boost

USB 2.0 increased the original data rate of USB from 12Mb/s to 480Mb/s, and now USB 3.0 is set to multiply that bandwidth tenfold. The new 3.0 connectors and cables will be physically and functionally compatible with older hardware­—of course, you won’t get maximum bandwidth unless you’re using a USB 3.0 cable with Superspeed devices and ports.

USB 3.0 will use nine lines; five new lines will sit parallel to the original four lines on a different plane, making it easy to differentiate between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 cables. Two of the new lanes will transmit data while another pair will receive data; the fifth cable provides an additional ground.

A new interrupt-driven protocol keeps nonactive or idle devices (which aren’t being charged by the USB port) from having their power drained by the host controller as it looks for active data traffic. Active devices will send the host a signal to begin data transfer. This feature will also be backward compatible with USB 2.0 certified devices. Hardware partners should have USB 3.0 controllers designed by mid 2009, but consumers won’t see products until early 2010.

PCI-E 3.0

Pleasantly Predictable

Given the choice between pre-pre-draft specs, a political standards war, or a boring, uneventful rollout, we’ll take option C any day. It doesn’t get any more boring than PCI Express, which launched and axed AGP almost overnight with very little drama. For the most part, it worked and worked well. The rollout to PCI-E 2.0 went even better than the original’s launch.

PCI-E 3.0 is just around the corner, and we’re confident in its abilities. PCI-E 1.0 spit out 2.5 gigatransfers a second and PCI-E 2.0 doubled that to 5GT/s. PCI-E goes to just 8GT/s yet actually doubles the data rate by improving the encoding efficiency by 25 percent.

The PCI Special Interest Group said it took this route to save power. The PCI-E 3.0 spec is expected to be fully backward-compatible when it’s introduced in 2010. A final spec is expected late next year with testing to take place soon after. If it’s anything like PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0, it’ll just work.