Over the years to come there might be an interesting move in the power supply industry. Intel is hard at work on a new PSU standard, purely based on 12 Volts. That would mean a power supply with just a 10-pin ATX connector and a primary voltage of 12Volts.

Admittedly, we'd not be opposed to the idea as it could help with efficiency but also cheaper power supplies. Currently, power supplies have 3.3 5 and 12 Volts, but most of your PC is consuming at that 12 Volt feed, your graphics card and processor for example. Then typically two rails are added to provide 3.3 volts and 5 Volts towards a USB drives, HDD or SSDs.

A new standard is developed by Intel, it is called ATX12VO and as you have guessed by now, it will only offer a 12 volts connection. So doesn't that pose a big issue with the compatibility of 5V devices like your SSD? Well no, because future motherboards will then become responsible for converting 12 volts to other required voltages through DC-DC conversion. How that would work out cables wise remains a bit of a question though.

Such a power supply would need much fewer wires on that ATX motherboard connector, and as such ATX12VO only has 10 cables at that specific connector. Of course, there will be PEG connectors, etc for say your graphics card leading from the PSUs, but really all cables coming from that PSU would be 12v based.

The new standard will be implemented in the industry first, and it might take many years before it'll hit the consumer market. Intel will release the ATX12VO specification this year. At CES the prototypes already have been shown. You can read up on the new spec right here.





