Intel skips PATA and AC97 with ICH8

Intel seems to have plans to completely move over to the Serial ATA interface with the launch of its ICH8 southbridge. Already with the ICH7 southbridge we saw motherboard with only one PATA channel and HD Audio sound circuit instead of AC97. With ICH8 it seems the support for PATA units (IDE) is gone according to block diagrams that has appearted at the hardware site HKEPC. The question is if the market is really ready to leave IDE. There are loads of harddrives, but the number of optical units with the SATA interface are a lot of fewer. If Intel sticks to this it should mean we will see a lot more optical units with the SATA interface.

Source: TechReport