ATI's SB650 south bridge will have 6 SATA ports, RAID 5

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 9th June 2006

SB650 may well bridge the gap between the ATI and NVIDIA south bridge, unless NVIDIA has something up its sleeves.

We got wind that ATI is already readying a replacement for the recently introduced SB600 south bridge.

There are no suggestions as to when the updated SB650 south bridge will launch. However, we have learned that it will support 6 SATA 3Gbps ports with comprehensive RAID 5 functionality and we understand that it is pin-compatible with the current SB600 chip.

We believe that this is in response to NVIDIA's recently-announced nForce 500-series, which features an industry-first 6 native SATA 3Gbps ports, with the option for dual RAID 5 or a massive 6-disk RAID array.

ATI's SB600 south bridge resolves virtually all of the performance-related I/O problems that were apparent in previous south bridge implementations, namely SB400 and SB450. However, SB600 doesn't feature support for RAID 5 - everything else that you would expect in a south bridge is there.

SB650 looks as if it will bridge the gap between ATI and NVIDIA in the increasingly competitive chipset market.

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