[citation needed] Intel claimed that, because of the high-speed channel between the sections, the IHA was faster than the earlier northbridge/southbridge design,[3] which hooked all low-speed ports to the PCI bus.
This new revision allowed for dedicated data paths for transferring greater than 1.0 GB/s of data to and from the MCH, which support I/O segments with greater reliability and faster access to high-speed networks.
IHA is now considered obsolete and no longer used, being superseded by the Direct Media Interface architecture.
The Platform Controller Hub (PCH) providing most of the features previously seen in ICH chips while moving memory, graphics and PCI Express controllers to the CPU, introduced with the Intel 5 Series chipsets in 2009.
This chipset architecture is still used in desktops, in some notebooks it is going to be replaced by SoC processor designs.