What they should drop is also serialport, printerport and ps/2 support. Heck, everyone should do that not only Intel.

I don't mind PATA being dropped, but before that's done I really want optical SATA-drivers available as cheap as the current PATA-ones.

Probably they are doing this for DRM security. Serial and Parallel ports are open specs. Anybody can get non-secure access over a serial port. They want to close off the PC architecture. I'm against it. Too many old instruments still use good old serial for control and access.

The new Dell optiplex systems dropped the PS/2 starting with the gx280 mode. Good call.

EDIT: hehe. typo

'Intel started to phase out both with the ICH7 family"

what a coincindence, I've already started to phase out all of the intel machines in my office. YaY!

Dont get me wrong, I dont h8te intel, they are just at the wrong place at the wrong time. If they are gonna get rid of the legacy crap, they should start with the x86 cpu that they have been milking out for the past couple of decades.

That being said, I still use my serial port for my Sony universal remote and receiver that I use on my tv tuner card. Then again I could always upgrade to the ATI AIW remote. I like the Sony remote better, cus its more flexible and has a programable LCD.

don't know why they bother. Manufacturers will still pack PATA on the boards with addon chips. You basically kill support for all optical drives (barring less than 1% that aren't PATA) trying to do this. Real smart. But then intelligence isn't what Intel has been known for lately.

In the short term this move may make people who upgrade incrementally a little mad that their new mobo might not have a PATA, especially for optical drivers.

In the longer term, this will save costs by not having to include PATA, serial, and parallel ports, and "encourgae" optical drive makers to finally start making SATA drives. It will also strip out some of the logic on the motherboards.

In terms of routers and imbedded devices that need the n, 8, 1, 9600 bps serial ports, those need to start going to USB like the rest of the world did around 8 years ago. It took mice and keyboards 1-2 years to go USB and 9 years after USB was intro'd we still have devices that insist on using the serial port for initial (and sometimes additional) configuration.

There are huge numbers of devices that are configured by serial port.
Many embedded devices (like cisco routers, ethernet switches) are usually first configured 9600,n,8,1 with vt100 serial console (hyperterm etc).

I work for a comms manufacturer - we find it quite annoying that a lot of laptops dont even have a 9pin serial port any more. USB -> serial adaptors and drivers vary greatly in compatibility and performance.

Serial is still a useful port. I dont know why 25pin parallel is still popular, especially on laptops. Ive seen laptops that kept a 25pin parallel port and ditched the serial ! Insane.

Dropping AC'97 is all fine and dandy. That should be welcomed by anyone. The only downside you could get out of it is that motherboards will be $1 more expensive (Yes, I made that number up but I don't expect it to be a lot.)

I am pissed about the lack of PATA support though. If you don't own any other computers and are buying a new system then there is no harm in not having pata support. If the sky fell and you later needed access to a pata drive you could buy a $20 usb enclosure and pull the necessary info off of it.

For the rest of us though that only serves to aggravate. I still have many large capacity pata drives that are working perfectly. Basically you are looking at buying a $20 pci ide controller, oh wait, silly me, they are killing off pci as fast as they can too. Ok so the day a cheap pci-e card comes out you can do this. Or I know, toss out that perfectly good pci sound card and upgrade to a pci-e, oh wait, silly me! Hopefully by then they at least have 2 pci slots left so you can pull this off.

Or just get it over with already and replace your perfectly good pata hd. That is only $100-200 or so.

Any way you look at it for most enthusiasts a jump to the new intel system will just cost you more money than it should. Though I guess if you have bought a intel system recently that is to be expected.

The real aggravating thing is that through all this forced obsoleteness they have boxed many of us in too tightly. To fix one problem caused by it you run into another and another. If I had thousands of dollars to keep every last thing in my system brand new I WOULD. We have to make due with what we have and sadly I still have many working large pata drives that still have years left on their warranty. Funny thing is that this stuff can become unusable even before it dies or the warranty expires...

so, just like board manufacturers put SATA bridges onto their boards for more support, i imagine there will be birdge chips for the PATA support. i'd be willing to bet intel will even make one themselves - that costs extra, of course.

no worries, folks. PATA isn't going anywhere, it's just going to cost more.

This is stupid, we still have serial and parallel ports on 90% of motherboards, yet we wont support IDE? Il concede it is stupid how slow the industry has been to move to SATA as far as devices go, there is only one SATA optical drive that i know of (plextor, like $100) and most new hard drives are still coming out on IDE first and then phasing in SATA models.

Yet on the flip side things like pcie are being forced upon us. Case in point, my nforce3 ultra board died last week. I thought, no biggie ill just get another one, um no, not only are they not in production, you cant buy one, anywhere, except ebay. And not just, the model I have, you cant buy any Nforce3 Ultra board online period. They need to make up there minds.

They should keep PS/2 until USB works *perfectly* for mice and keyboards (including the use of KVMs).

Hopefully this will spur optical manufacturers to begin showing a little more effort to making Sata drives. I still can't believe the lack of them, considering it doesn't take much to throw a bridge chip on there. And seeing the Legacy ports go bye-bye would only make me too happy.

um, how many choices are there for SATA optical drives? I only remember the Plextor model, which is pricey and not the greatest performer..

Give me 12 USB, no PS/2, and hardware accelerated onboard audio.. then I'd be happy :)

EP

Old news :P

http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=38072

(Last part of the first post)

You also forgot it gets 2 more USB ports. Up from 8 to 10 i think.

But besides that and 90nm process, nothing fancy.

Bt I usually dont set my trust to slides at that site. The same people listed a 2.93Ghz Woodcrest CPU that is at best, imaginary on a "Intel" slide.