Intel kills off IDE, only a year or two early

Let 6-6-06 be remembered as the day the optical drive died. Today intel launched a new line of chipsets for the upcoming, all mighty Cointreau (ehh hmm, Core 2), the 965 series. Let's let the complications of just why a newer chipset with better features gets a lower model number aside, and look into the big problem: no IDE.

This was a rumor not too long ago, and it is real today. The ICH8 south bridge that everyone will want on their next motherboard has absolutely no IDE abilities. Now I'm all for cutting the non-crucial legacy stuff, but without IDE we have no ATAPI, which means no optical drive support without a driver.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, however with every manufacturer making their own driver, things start to get really ugly. Kinda like Windows 95 CD-RW ugly. Get the drift?

What's worse is that every motherboard manufacturer knows that we still need our IDE channel, so there will be an extra drive controller on every board. I didn't have a problem with cramming more and more ports on a board as long as they could be turned off, but you really need this port, and the extra 5 seconds or so of POST time the extra controller needs to boot up it's own BIOS.

For the major players in the field, this may actually become less of a hassle than you may think. We all know that Dell/Apple/HP can't afford another chip to wreak their cheap motherboards, so they'll have to go with SATA optical drives. I'm sure that Apple's new Mac Pro will have SATA opticals, and there will be no problem making Mac OS work like a charm with them. Boot camp, on the other hand... let's just say that's “Unsupported Software.”

The big baller Dell shouldn't have too much trouble getting their drives to work with XP, but future upgrades could be very frustrating for end users. I can hear Bob yelling now “What do you mean I can't plug in my Blu-Ray burner I just paid $750 for!”

Thankfully, the green goblins just launched a “new” set of chipsets for Cointreau, and Ruby's bottom half is finally working, so there will be options.