AMD was the first with a chipset with integrated support for the latest storage interface SATA 6,0 Gbps. AMD 890GX has had this functionality since the release of the SB850 southbridge and even if there is currently only one storage unit that can make use of the performance of SATA 6.0 Gbps, Crucial RealSSD C300, it is still interesting to see how first real implementation of the specification stands up to the different discrete solutions that have been used by motherboard makers.
At Anandtech they haev published an interesting comparison where they look at the SATA 6.0 Gbps performance in the AMD 890GX chipset and compare it to discrete PCIe x1 solutions and integrated third party solutions from ASUS, Gigabyte and Intel.
The results very more than you might think and we can see how SATA 6.0 Gbps is nothing but a hoax over the PCIe 1.0 interface, like the solutions we have with Intel P55 and H55. ASUS is one of few that has managed to come up with a decent solution with the PLX bridge chip.
In general the AMD SB850 southridge performance abit worse than expected when reading, but impress us when writing data and internal numbers from coming BIOS updates promises much fun with AMD’s implementation of SATA 6.0 Gbps. Now we just need more drives that can actually take advantage of the technology.
