Cebit 07: Expresscards 'will migrate to desktops'

Far easier upgrade path than using internal cards, said PCMCIA director

Expresscard slots now appearing in notebooks will migrate to desktop machines because they provide an easy upgrade path, according to the excutive director of the governing PCMCIA organisation.

Patrick Mayer told a Cebit press conference that he was confident it would happen, because the slots give add-on devices a direct route to the host machine’s chipset.

Expresscards, a faster and smaller cousin of the PC Card (formerly called a PCMCIA card), were initially seen as a possible replacement for internal PC expansion cards because many users do not like to open up a PC.

But they have so far been seen only in notebooks – and are still not implemented on all machines as standard. One reason may be that they cannot take old PC Cards, which means users still want the old slots in new machines to use cards they already own.

Mayer said all top 10 vendors offer machines with Expresscard slots. He said an estimate by analyst IDC that only two in three notebooks would have them by 2010 was an underestimate.

Expresscards effectively extend the PCI-Express bus to peripherals, where the old PC Cardbus slot extends the PCI bus. Mayer said: “Notebook makers are not going to want to support both buses for ever.”