Intel

Interesting AMD FCH-on-a-Stick Addon Card Gives the Appearance of Intel CPU on AMD Chipset

AMD creates the top X670E and X870E chipsets by joining two AMD "Promontory 21" FCH chips at the hip. Each of these take in a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection, and put out 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes and four SATA 6 Gbps ports that can be re-configured as four additional Gen 3 lanes. The X870E/X670E chipset hence has a total of 12 PCIe 4.0 lanes and up to eight SATA 6 Gbps ports on the platform. A company decided to put one of these chips on an add-on card, so you could upgrade your single-FCH platform, such as B650, B850, or X870, with more PCIe lanes wired out as additional M.2 slots, and some SATA ports.

PC enthusiasts in China decided to install this card on an Intel motherboard to hilarious results—utilities such as AIDA64 are confused, thinking these Promontory 21 chips are the platform's main chipset. This gives the appearance of an Intel processor on an AMD chipset motherboard. The card has four M.2 slots, two on each side, and four SATA 6 Gbps ports. At least two of these are Gen 4 x4, while the others could be Gen 3 x4 and M.2-SATA, used when none of the SATA 6 Gbps ports is connected. There's no word on how to get one of these cards.