Intel I/O Controller Hub – Part 3

A family of Intel southbridge microchips, I/O Controller Hub (ICH) is used to manage data communications between a CPU and a motherboard. This specifically holds for Intel chipsets based on the Intel Hub Architecture. It is designed to be paired with a second support chip known as a northbridge. The ICH is used to connect and control peripheral devices.

ICH5

The ICH5 was created in conjunction with the i865 and i875 northbridges in 2003 with an integrated SATA host controller. The ICH5R variant additionally supported RAID 0 on SATA ports. Eight USB-2.0 ports were available. The chip had full support for ACPI 2.0. It had 460 pins. Variants:

82801E (C-ICH) Communications
82801EB (ICH5) Base
82801ER (ICH5R) RAID
82801EBM (ICH5-M) Base Mobile
6300ESB (ESB) Enterprise Southbridge

ICH6

Intel’s first PCI Express southbridge, ICH6 made four PCI Express ×1 ports available. The MCH was accommodated with faster ×16-Ports and 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. Also included was the support for Intel High Definition Audio along with the support for AC’97 and the classical PCI 2.3. Variants:

82801FB (ICH6) Base
82801FR (ICH6R) RAID
82801FBM (ICH6M) Base Mobile
6311ESB (ESB2) Enterprise Southbridge
6321ESB (ESB2) Enterprise Southbridge with integrated LAN for embedded

ICH7

Together with Intel’s new high-end MCH, the i955X, the ICH7 started to ship in mid-2005. The two new additions were the PCI express ×1-Ports, a SATA 2.0 Controller for up to 300 MB/s data transmission rate (the mobile version has this capability disabled) and support for Intel’s “Active Management Technology”. Variants: