Intel tradition to deprive users from regular technologies due to the failure of support update in the new chipsets was many time observed : it is worthwhile to recall at least the absence of IDE support in the southern bridges of series ICH8. If we believe the communications of Israeli site IO panel, which referred to the specialists, who took direct part in the development of south bridges ICH9 and ICH10, a similar tendency will be preserved in those future south bridges.
Unfortunately, the source indicated only partial data about the possibilities of south bridges ICH9 and ICH10, and to isolate the list of the functional possibilities is sufficiently complicated. Let us recall that the south bridges series ICH9 will be used in chipsets of family bearlake, whose announcement is planned on May 2007. Until now to us it was known only about some improvements in the part of SATA support and RAID, provided in south bridges series ICH9.
South bridge ICH10 and its varieties will forgo the support of ports PS/2 and LPT. Here all user need to passe to USB keyboards and mouse . Let us note that ABIT company attempts to remove the support of PS/2 and ports LPT/COM from spring 2002.
New south bridges will be support 10 gigabit net controller. If we consider that to 2010 propagation will obtain the 100-gigabit net controllers, then there is no surprise for the appearance in 2008 of 10 gigabit net controller in the composition of motherboard for Intel processors. New net controller will possess the decreased energy consumption, and it will not have high load on the central processor. The modifications of future south bridges intel can acquire a hardware fire wall.
This time intel planned to add in the desktop south bridges the support of the wireless net interface class wiFi. Let us recall that the first attempt was taken in the composition of south bridges series ICH6 in the middle of 2004. Idea then was removed; however, the interface wiFi since this time find much higher popularity.
The north bridges, which work paired with ICH10, must forgo the support of DDR-2 in favor DDR- 3. The soon released in this year chipsets bearlake will preserve compatibility with both memory types , although the motherboard producers will for sure give preference to some memory type . Finally, the speed of chipsets series bearlake in the bandwidth with processors conroe must be by 15% higher than in predecessors.