PC Peripherals Intel next-gen South Bridge to kill parallel ATA

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dipdude

Forerunner
ICH8 has Serial ATA only, apparently

Intel's upcoming ICH8 South Bridge chip, a key component of its 'Broadwater' family of chipsets, will wave farewell to the Parallel ATA bus, if a presentation slide said to have come from the company and posted online is to believed. Also for the chop is the AC'97 sound system.

According to the slide, posted on Chinese-language site HKEPC, the ICH8 South Bridge will increase the number of USB 2.0 ports supported to ten. As expected, the part will support Intel's Active Management Technology, which will presumably give remote systems managers the ability to engage another ICH8 feature: USB port disabling.

The slide also suggests Broadwater chipsets will support up to six 3Gbps Serial ATA ports and host six PCI Express x1 lanes. The South Bridge will integrate Gigabit Ethernet. An "advanced" fan control system will help to keep system temperatures down, part of Intel's performance-per-Watt philosophy.

Carried over from the current ICH7 South Bridge series are support for Intel's Matrix Storage Technology for RAID, the chip maker's Quick Resume Technology and ACPI 3.0 power management.

Different ICH8 SKUs will support some or all of these features, the slide warns. HKEPC's correspondent reckons there will be four ICH8 versions: ICH8R for RAID; ICH8DO and ICH8DH for digital office and digital home systems, presumably 'Averill' and Viiv machines, respectively; and a vanilla ICH8 for entry-level generic PCs.

The ICH8 line will be included in the upcoming P965, G965, Q965 and Q963 chipsets.
 
I don't see them killing ATA right now - there are too many ATA hdds still in use. It took them years to kill ISA - and that was only possible because there was no need for the old peripherals in new PCs. But a new PC will still need to be able to access an old hdd every once in a while (while it will very rarely need to use an old sound card). And yes, as zhops said, where are the optical SATA?

What is possible is that they remove RAID support for ATA. Anyone who buys a new system, and then runs it in RAID, would have to be a fool to run it on ATA.
 
Lol.

OT

Whats with the Bald guy Avatars :S... Blady, Switch and Chaos.. Zzz

/OT

Anyways, i havent seen ANY, SATA CD/DVD Rom Drives around.

Lets hope this springs companies into action to bring new ones :).
 
You get almost everything in PCI-e x1 nowadays. Except for sound cards.

IVe seen, Lan cards, TV Tuners, blah blah, in pci-e 1x
 
oh you never know what intel does.

They forcefully killed AGP didnt they.

And if they adopt strict SATA everyone will start making SATA optical drives.

Unfortunately its one of the companies that can force issue on entire industry.
 
There is a difference between AGP and SATA.

If you upgrade your motherboard, chances are you will upgrade your gfx card anyway.

But old HDDs still need to be use, especially to transfer data from the old PC to the new one.
 
^^

Not when PCI express was forcefully pushed by intel. There were hardly any pci express card market that exsisted.

And there are ways to get current ATA data transfered to SATA cheaply. PATA to usb cable for few hundred bucks does the job. There are pata to sata converter units too.

Anyway thats not the issue. If Intel wants to force it they will, and quiet successfully.

Same people telling this is bad move will tell that PATA are outdated anyway get sata in a years time like people talk about AGP these days ;)

There are some things a company can do if they have kinda more than 70% grip on market ;)

Its not good but it has happened and it can happen again.
 
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