Introduction



Before we got the actual technical information, Sir Henry, president of Gigabyte shared a few words about Gigabyte's policy and philosophy. A lot of Gigabyte boasting, obviously, but also providing us an insight in why Gigabyte is releasing such a large amount of motherboards.


Src: HWbot

As explained by Sir Henry, Gigabyte wants to offer the latest technology to each segment of the market as they believe end-users should always be using the latest technology, even if their budget isn't that big. So, in contrary to some other vendors, Gigabyte applies new technology to the whole range of boards, from high-end to low-end.



At first sight, this is indeed a good thing, especially for the end-user, but it does make the Gigabyte product list look like total chaos. Agreed, the low-end user should be able to use the latest technology, but the same low-end user mostly has no clue about what's new and what's better. Confusing product names, at least from a non-IT point of view, doesn't help the end-user.

The main presentation was given by Jackson Hsu, global product manager. Let's start by explaining the first two threes in regard to USB innovation.


A photo of a Jackson Hsu presenting who's presenting the presentation of the motherboard!

USB3.0 and USB 3x Power

The new USB standard allows users to benefit from higher transfer rates: up to 4.8Gbps (600MB/s), whereas USB 2.0 had to do with only 480Mbps (roughly 60MB/s) and USB 1.0 only 12Mbps (1,5MB/s). To translate this into a more real-life comparison, in theory, using USB 3.0, you could copy a file of 25GB from your device to the hard disk drive in 70 seconds. For USB 2.0, this will take around 14 minutes and, well, for 1.0 ... 9,3 hours.

To understand how they increased the performance, we need to have a look at the design of USB 2.0. In short, this technology uses a so-called half-duplex bus. For those who are in the unknown, duplex means that the bus can send signals from and to the receiver/sender.

In other words, the signal can be transferred from your device to the system and the other way around, all using the same data bus. The issue with USB 2.0 is, however, that this bus is only half-duplex. This means that although the bus can be used for data traffic in both ways, it only allows traffic in one way at any particular moment in time. Underneath picture should explain this:



Basically, when a signal is sent from device to system, the signals from system to device have to be halted until the signal from the device has arrived. Obviously, this increases the latency quite a bit and, thus, the resulting maximum theoretical bandwidth.

Now, for USB3.0, this design has changed from half-duplex to dual simplex. As you probably already figure, simplex means 'one-way street': the data bus can only transfer signals from device to system OR the other way around, but not both directions. Dual means that, for obvious reasons, there are two of those data buses. The main advantage of this design is that neither the device nor the system has to wait with sending signals.

The second three, in Gigabyte’s 333 logo, stands for 3x USB power. Basically, Gigabyte increased the available current for USB devices so that you never need two USB ports or need an external power connector to provide enough power for one device.

A normal USB 2.0 bus has a standardised current of 500mA; as USB3.0 offers a greater bandwidth, or data throughput, the standard current has been increased from 0,5A to 900mA. Now, to solve the problem mentioned a few lines earlier, Gigabyte has increased the available current for any USB device from 500mA to 1500mA (USB2.0) and 900mA to 2700mA (USB3.0).

Note that this doesn't mean that the power consumption has increased. To make it really simple: the current isn't pumped to the USB device, but the USB sucks a certain amount of current. So, this is merely an increase of the maximum available current, not by definition an increase in used current.

Another Gigabyte innovation is the increased stability for USB power. At 4.65V or lower, an USB device will stop functioning so, with the necessity of more stability due to the higher transfer rates, Gigabyte did the necessary to ensure full stability.

They have widened the voltage trace coming from the 5V line of the 24-pin ATX power connector, which lowers the impedance and for in case an USB port short-circuits, Gigabyte used one low-resistance fuse per USB port, whereas other vendors sometimes opt for one fuse per two or more ports. I have some doubts, however, regarding the necessity of these innovations. Personally, I have never experienced failing USB ports due to undervoltage, let alone have blown a fuse using the USB port. But then again, my experience with USB3.0 devices is pretty much non-existent.

Sata

As some of you might remember, vendors were trying to get Sata 6G working for the launch of the LGA1156-P55 platform, but due to instability issues (chip was not mature enough) no one actually implemented this technology. With the new Marvell chip, the SE9128, these instability issues are solved and, in addition to this, it now has Raid0 support, something which was not present on the SE9123 chip.

During the presentation a lot of figures were shown which proved that Sata 6G was indeed much faster. Do note that all these figures were synthetic benchmarks and, for instance, no windows boot time or in-game scene loading. We’ll try to provide some early Sata 6G performance data once the hardware is available. I didn't note down the exact numbers as I made the incorrect assumption that the presentation would be handed out on USB sticks afterwards, but I did make some notes on the performance and future products.

Overall performance going from SATA 3G to SATA 6G was roughly 10%

Both Seagate and Western Digital hard disk drives will be equipped with a Marvell chip.

SSD variants will be available in Q1 2010

This new technology will most likely be implemented in the Intel chipset in Q4 2011/Q1 2012. It's widely assumed (and possibly confirmed *wink*) that this chipset will be named P65.



Before we jump to the conclusive part of this small article, have a quick glance at the SE9128 architectural scheme a few lines above. The smart guys and girls under us will notice that the maximum theoretical input bandwidth exceeds the maximum possible output data by a very large margin. As the Marvell Sata controller has to be connected to the CPU in some way, most vendors will opt for a solution that uses one of the PCIe lanes of the P55 chip; a 5Gbps PCIe 2.0 x1 lane. The problem is, however, that this new technology is Sata 6Gbps. In other words, the input bandwidth is exceeding the output from the moment you hook up one drive. Let alone what happens with 2 or more drives attached to the controller.

So, what's the solution?

One of the great innovations of the LGA1156-p55 platform is that the IOH moved into the processor, on the non-core die. A part of the IOH is the PCIe connection of which there are two available on any Lynnfield processor: either x16 or x8 x8 configuration.

Now, Gigabyte uses one of those PCIe lanes to connect to the Marvell SE9128, this increasing the SE9128-to-processor bandwidth and reducing the latency. The first benefit is pretty obvious, the second maybe a bit less. In short, the normal design requires two buses to transfer the data: one from the Marvell to P55 (PCIe) and one from the P55 to the CPU (DMI). In Gigabyte's design, the only bus is the PCIe bus in between Marvell controller and processor, which has the same clock frequency (and thus latency) as the PCIe bus from Marvell to P55.

We inquired Gigabyte about the effect of the Marvell data on the graphics card performance in crossfire mode. Apparently, Gigabyte made it possible that if the bus is saturated with VGA data, the data is transferred via the P55 again. Interference should be non-existing. We also inquired about the temperature of the P55/X58; as data throughput increases, temperature should increase as well. The answer was an expected "you always need to cool the components", although possibly more obligatory than usual.

New products

Last but not least, the products. The new technology will be implemented on both P55, X58 and 790FX-based configurations.

There's also a new mainboard series coming up, the UD7, which will feature the NF200 chipset to allow 3-Way SLI. Possibly just to have an alternative for the MSI Big Bang Trinergy. This is the only picture we took from the products as they are already available on the market.



Conclusive thoughts

The new USB3.0 and Sata 6G standards do seem to offer quite a performance boost, but as long as there are no products available on the market, I'm not sure we can really judge about the value of these additions to upcoming motherboards.

The fact that Intel hasn't announced a new chipset using this new technology might be an indication of a slow introduction of products that fully use the bandwidth provided by USB3.0 and Sata 6G.

Apart from that, this also makes us wonder about the necessity of Sata 6G as a whole. As USB is easier to use and can handle enough bandwidth to not completely bottleneck any data-transfer, why would we need Sata to connect harddisk drives? I presume compatibility may be an issue ... (Editor’s note : compatibility, reliability, but most important: industry standards.)