It is designed to be paired with a second support chip known as a northbridge.As with any other southbridge, the ICH is used to connect and control peripheral devices.Accordingly, starting with the Intel 5 Series, a new architecture was used that incorporated some functions of the traditional north and south bridge chips onto the CPU itself, with the remaining functions being consolidated into a single Platform Controller Hub (PCH).
![]() While its predecessor, the PIIX, was connected to the northbridge through an internal PCI bus with a bandwidth of 133 MB s, the ICH used a proprietary interface (called by Intel Hub Interface ) that linked it to the northbridge through an 8- bit wide, 266 MBs bus. Another design decision was to substitute the rigid North-South axis on the motherboard with a star structure. Thus, the northbridge became the Memory Controller Hub (MCH) or if it had integrated graphics (e.g., Intel 810 ), the Graphics and Memory Controller Hub (GMCH). Customers were not willing to pay the high prices for RDRAM and either bought i810 or i440BX motherboards or changed to the competition. The hastily developed 82815 northbridge, which supported PC-133 SDRAM, became Intels method to recover in the middle range segment. An ICH2 could also be used with Intels 82850 chipset, which, like the 82820 before it, required the use of RDRAM and supported the Pentium 4 CPU. For the first time a Fast Ethernet chip (82559) was integrated into the southbridge, depending upon an external PHY chip. The integrated AC97 sound controller gained support for up to six channel sound. The most important innovation was the support of USB 2.0 on all six ports. Sound support was improved and corresponded the newest AC97 specification, version 2.3. Like the preceding generation, the ICH4 had 421 pins. The ICH5R variant additionally supported RAID 0 on SATA ports. In the new chip generation, Intel therefore offered an optional port for a Gigabit Ethernet Controller directly attached to the MCH. A cause was the insufficient ESD tolerance of certain ICH5 steppings. Intel reacted to the problem by shipping ICH5 with increased ESD tolerance. Effective ESD preventive measures on USB ports are difficult and costly, since they can impair the quality of the USB-2.0 high-speed signals. Many motherboard manufacturers had omitted the necessary high-quality safety devices for front panel connectors for cost reasons. The bottleneck Hub interface was replaced by a new Direct Media Interface (in reality a PCI Express 4 link) with 1 GB s of bandwidth per direction. In addition, AC97 and the classical PCI 2.3 were still supported. The ICH6R variant supported RAID modes 0, 1, 01 and the Intel specific Matrix RAID. Intel 82801 Pci Bridge Software Access PointOriginally Intel had planned to bring two further variants under the names ICH6W and ICH6RW to the market, which should contain a software Access Point for a Wireless LAN. Two additional PCI express 1-Ports, a SATA 2.0 Controller for up to 300 MBs data transmission rate (the mobile version has this capability disabled), as well as support for Intels Active Management Technology were added. Only the ICH7DH, ICH7R, ICH7-M, ICH7-M DH chip have AHCI support.
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