The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a rumour that Intel is set to dump PCI from its motherboards. The rumour has started mostly because of the upcoming Sandy bridge CPUs with integrated graphics and the 6 Series of chipsets.

It seems that Intel is dropping support for a certain PCI functionality that has existed for about 20 years. HotHardware claims that the reason behind this is the supposed fact that many of today's newest products are capable of using up the entire PCI bandwidth, maxed out at 133MB/s, all on their own. This includes even certain mechanical hard disk drives.

The problem is that PCI is what many people have become used to, which is exactly the reason why most add-in cards are still compatible with it.

If Intel drops support, third-party manufacturers are guaranteed to keep providing bridge chips. But it could be used as a pretext for manufacturers to move on.