Intel Developer Forum End users can expect to plug their monitors into a new digital interface in the future. At Intel's Developer Forum tomorrow, the company will announce its digital video interface, said Steve Whalley, head of desktop product group initiatives in the US. Monitor manufacturers, including Samsung, are supporting the move. The move is part of Intel's plans to remove legacy technology from PCs. But Whalley said the new connector is likely to be slowly phased in before it completely replaces the VGA interface. "It will take some time before the interface is diffused through the market," he said. "You'll see VGA and the digital video interface together for some time," he said. But Intel, together with Microsoft, do not yet feel the market is ready for the Firewire 1394 interface, said Whalley. "1394 is not the mainstream market," he said. The cost of USB is practically nothing, while he claimed that adding 1394 to a PC will add between $7 and $12 to the cost of a system. While both Microsoft and Intel have set themselves the goal of waving goodbye to ISA sockets by early next year, the PCI bus is still good for some time, Whalley said. "The next wave is removing parallel and serial ports and replacing them with USB," he said. While he would not confirm or deny that future chipsets will support more than one USB channel, he conceded that the idea made sense. ®