Will the -12V rail be dropped soon?

[Pink Jazz]

With Conventional PCI slots disappearing from many new motherboards, this is eliminating the last usage of the -12V rail on power supplies. Originally, the -12V rail was included on power supplies for RS-232 logic, however, Conventional PCI slots have a -12V line on one of their pins, and was used by some sound cards as a reference voltage to drive their op-amps.

So, does anyone think it will be a matter of time when the -12V rail is dropped from the ATX standard or at least becomes optional? The -5V rail was dropped when the ISA bus was gone from motherboards.

 

[sm625]

Not likely. The last major revision was done to increase the number of +3.3V and +12V pins. There really isnt any push to add more pins and they arent going to revise a standard just to subtract one pin. ATX will probably die with that pin on there.