Marvell revealed their new 88SE92 Series SATA 6Gbps controllers

Marvell has today introduced its new line of SATA 6 Gbps controllers, in the number of three, they’re featured under the 88SE92 Series. These are the 2-port 88SE9220, 4-port 88SE9230 and 4-port 88SE9235.

All three of them take advantage of the new PCI-Express 2.0 x2 interface, until now hypothetically impossible without any slot specifications from PCI-SIG. However, with the constantly growing demand for system bandwidth, low pin-counts and package size, PCIe 2.0 x2 has finally emerged as a viable solution, as for PCIe 3.0, it’s still rather ‘young’.

With PCIe 2.0 x2, controller now have a system bandwitdh of 1000 MB/s per direction, resulting in 2000 MB/s total, which now ensures the connected SATA 6 Gbps devices won’t face bottleneck at a given time (something that was impossible on older PCIe 2.0 x1 chips).

In addition, the new ‘bottleneck-avoiding’ system bandwidth now also allows the added support for up to four SATA 6 Gbps ports (88SE9230 and 88SE9235). Furthermore, port multipliers is also supported on all three models.

Starting at the top-of-the-line we have the 88SE9230, supporting Marvell RAID software, HyperDuo (Marvell’s in-house SSD caching technology), RAID 0, 1, 10 modes, AHCI, and 128/256-bit AES native encryption.

Lower we have the cost-effective version of the 88SE9230, the 88SE9235, which lacks RAID and features AHCI/IDE modes only (therefore also lacking encryption).

As for the 2-port 88SE9220, if has all the features the 88SE9230 has, with the exception of RAID 10 (as you may know, impossible with just two drives).

As for pin-count and size, Marvell was able to keep the 4-port chip as low as 76 pins with a package size of 9 mm². The 2-port chip is similar to the existing chips at 7 mm². It’s also possible these new chips will make it to the upcoming LGA1155 motherboards based on Intel’s “Panther Point” 7-series chipset.

Here is a sum up of the specifications for each controller:

Source