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The majority of hard disk drives sold today feature a serial ATA (SATA) interface, however, with some motherboards having difficulty with serial ATA optical drives, most optical drives sold are still ATAPI/IDE based. However, this is set to change with many international OEM/ODM clients such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard requesting the use of SATA optical drives in place of ATAPI versions. As a result, the SATA optical drive market may take over ATAPI/IDE in the second half of the year.
With Intel only offering SATA support on their recent chipsets, motherboard makers have to add additional components to support ATAPI/IDE, which means that adding this support increases the motherboard price. However, like the first SATA hard drives, the retail pricing for SATA optical disc drives is still around 20% to 30% more than ATAPI versions and as SATA's advantage to optical drives is only minimal where the SATA cable is more compact, it makes SATA more difficult to take on IDE with those who build their own systems.
Further info can be read in this DigiTimes report. Thanks to GristyMcFisty for letting us know about this news.
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Intel says that they likely won't support PATA in at least one of their newer chipsets in the next batch (which are going by a 1-letter and only 2-number model naming system)
Now they just need to confirm that they're removing the long-obsolete floppy interface and we'll be set.
Next stop: SATA III
I would still say it's supported by them, since even Intel offers it on their own motherboards and is part of the reference board design specs. I should've said that the new motherboards using those new chipsets no longer have PATA as part of the standard design specs, and Intel plans on removing the option altogether on most of their motherboards, except on only a few value-level boards, as well as possibly their Extreme-series boards, which often have an additional 3rd-party drive controller anyway.
