INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, TAIPEI, April 13, 2004 – Helping to enable adoption of the advanced features of Serial ATA into the market, Intel Corporation today released the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) v1.0 final specification.

AHCI is developed by a broad industry group chaired by Intel. The AHCI Contributor Group, more than 40 members strong, consists of hardware developers, software developers, hard drive manufacturers and OEMs.

"AHCI provides a unified Serial ATA controller interface that is optimized for the advanced new features in Serial ATA II," said Thomas Loza, Intel technology initiatives manager. "By providing a single controller interface, AHCI enables operating system vendors and device suppliers to design to a common interface and focus their efforts on bringing to market such advanced features as native command queuing (NCQ)."

AHCI is intended to alleviate multiple controller implementations that traditionally fragment advanced capability development in traditional ATA storage environments. These features are expected to build on the momentum of the Serial ATA v.1.0 specification in those segments.

"AHCI enables host software to take advantage of the new native command queuing technology," said Mike Alexenko, senior director of Product and Technical Marketing, Maxtor. "With NCQ, Serial ATA devices can provide sophisticated command reordering optimizations for multi-threaded applications previously only available with higher-end storage interfaces.

"The multi-threaded performance capabilities of Maxtor’s next-generation NCQ-enabled disk drives combined with AHCI and Intel's next generation chipsets (codenamed Alderwood and Grantsdale) create new, cost-effective Serial ATA storage opportunities for a variety of desktop applications," said Alexenko.

The development of the AHCI spec is a major milestone in the effort to broadly deploy the advanced technology defined in the Serial ATA II specification. Serial ATA II is an enhanced version of the original Serial ATA specification, which will be used to connect such internal storage devices as hard disks, DVDs and CD-R/Ws to the motherboard in desktop and mobile PCs, cost-sensitive servers and networked storage.

Information on the AHCI v.1.0 final specification and the AHCI license agreement can be found at http://www.intel.com/technology/serialata/ahci.htm.