Intel has been having a hectic quarter after the recall of Cougar Point chipset (P67 and H67 Sandy Bridge chipset), but now they seem to be moving along swiftly. Apparently the new Z68 chipset for Sandy Bridge-based processors has begun production, with availability set for May. But that’s not the only thing the report says.

It seemed that the Z68 chipset will indeed support Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology SSD caching, something that many anticipated in the MacBook Pro but fail to appear. Well, the chipset is indeed based on the new B3 stepping therefore the SATA port 2-5 issue will not be present anymore. Judging from the specs, it seems Intel has catered Z68 especially for enthusiasts, which allows better processor overclocking, discrete graphics support and SSD caching capability.

Here’s a simple explanation. SSD caching marries a conventional hard drive to a relatively small solid-state drive (SSD), with the most frequently-accessed data automatically placed on the SSD for fast access while the two drives appear to users simply as a single drive much like RAID 0. The functionality serves to bring users much of the speed benefit of SSDs but with the storage capacity and lower cost of traditional hard drives. Best of both worlds it seemed.

SOURCE via vr-zone