Why do Intel's IDE controllers tend to outperform the rest of the pack?

[MadRat]

Although they are slow to pick up on new standards, Intel consistently has the fastest IDE controllers. What do they do that makes theirs the fastest?

 

[AndyHui]

Lots of effort and R&D.

 

[zzzz]

Intel consistently has the fastest IDE controllers.

Do you have a link to benchmarks?

 

[Ben50]

I think it has to do with the Intel App Accelerator

 

[Strych9]

Do you have a link to benchmarks?

 

[MadRat]

<<Do you have a link to benchmarks?>>

link

 

[Pariah]

You're using benchmarks from Intel's site for proof?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Because they're competing against VIA, which has lagged behind on both IDE and memory controller design in chipset after chipset (remember VIA's P3 PC133 performance being about equal to intel's BX with PC100?). I really wish intel's mobo chipset designers were in a separate company (not tied to intel CPUs), so Athlons could have had something better than a string of mediocre VIA chipsets.

 

[corkyg]

Like AndyHui says - lots of close effort and harmony. Remember - Intel controller engineers work very closely with Intel CPU and mobo engineers - Via and AMD don't have such a close relationship - they actually compete with one another for chipsets.

 

[MadRat]

You do realize that initial VIA chipsets shared a 33MHz bus for the entire south bridge and then saddled the north bridge with half the memory buffering of either an Intel 430TX or 440BX chipset. With their lousy IDE and USB implementations, slow asynchronous memory performance, unstable AGP4X, and weak memory buffering the performance was abyssmal in head to head competitions. They soon improved the buffering, solidified the AGP4X support, and added memory interleaving for the north bridge. VIA also came up with the V-link idea for the south bridge, which is up to 266Mhz, on the latest P4 chipset. The simpler initial designs were done for profitability, being that the simpler design was easier to pass through pre-production testing and to produce in mass quantity.

I'd think that the office performance marks of newer SiS and VIA chipsets would eventually catch up to Intel's IDE performance. Its a little closer in Anand's last roundup, but Intel still is king in this arena. I'm just wondering if there is a simple reason for their lead in performance.