The X570 chipset will offer some innovations in the AM4 motherboard segment for AMD processors, including the implementation of PCIe 4.0 and increasing the number of SATA 6G ports.
The X570 chipset can support the amazing number of 12 6 Gbps SATA ports (without the two ports removed from the AM4 SoC). One possible reason for this could have been that motherboard manufacturers could have equipped any M.2 slot on the motherboard with SATA cabling in addition to PCIe, without switches having to redirect the SATA connection from one of the physical ports.
With SoC’s two SATA ports removed from the equation and each of the M.2 slots receiving a direct SATA connection from the chipset, motherboard designers can connect the remaining SATA ports as physical ports without wasting resources on switches.
The chipset connects to the AM4 processor via a PCIe 4.0 x4 (8 GB/s) connection, which corresponds to a total of 16 tracks. This allows manufacturers to add two additional M.2 NVMe slots via PCIe 4.0 x4 in addition to the slot connected to the AM4 socket. The rest of the ways can be wired as U.2 ports, a PCIe x4 expansion slot (physically x16) and to connect other on-board devices that consume a lot of bandwidth, such as 10GbE PHYs connections, 802.11ax WLAN controllers, Thunderbolt 3 controllers and USB 3.1 gen 2 controllers.
Finally, the X570 chipsets integrate USB 3.1 Gen 2. The chipset offers eight stunning 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports (without the SoC ports) without the need for external drivers. This brings the total number of USB 3.1 gen 2 ports on the AMD Valhalla platform to 12, an interesting number compared to the 6 currently offered by Intel’s Z390.
Perhaps it is because of these innovations that the X570 motherboards would have higher prices compared to previous generations.