Intel completes official PCI bus support

Very soon another technology will be sent to the archive: after a few months, Intel will officially stop supporting the PCI bus . Created in 1992, the standard was supported by all x86 motherboards until 2004, when it passed the PCI Express baton.

The new Intel H67, P67 and H61 chipsets on the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture, which will be released in the second half of 2010, will no longer support standard PCI, and all peripherals and subsystems will be connected via PCI Express. The chipsets will also support the new LGA1155 socket , which differs in small details from the previous connector, so that old processors cannot be inserted.

Forced killing of outdated standards is quite a natural process in the conditions of rapid development of technologies, because without stopping the support of “mastodons” we slow down the progress and reduce the profits of the IT industry. In 2006, this happened with the EIDE-Parallel ATA standard, and then with floppy drives.
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However, Intel is not a monopolist, and independent motherboard manufacturers will most likely continue to release PCI-supported models, if the market demands it, just as they continue to support FDD and Parallel ATA by adding a couple of their own microcircuits alongside Intel.