Thunderbolt Heading to Windows PCs in 2012
Acer and Asus will release PCs with Thunderbolt technology early next year. Meanwhile, Intel says that copper wiring will be used in the foreseeable near future thanks to the high cost of fiber optics.
Wednesday Intel said that Acer and Asustek Computer will launch Windows-based PCs next year featuring Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect technology. The company made this revelation at this year's Intel Developer Forum as Mooly Eden, Intel's general manager of the PC client group, demonstrated Thunderbolt in action on a PC during his keynote address.
Since its debut back in February, Thunderbolt has been an exclusively-licensed feature on Apple's Macintosh computers, offering transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps between compatible devices and their host computers (USB 3.0 offers up to 5 Gbps). However, the demonstration seen on-stage at IDF showed solid state drives connected to a Windows PC and transferring four uncompressed videos at 700 MB/s.
For now, Thunderbolt only supports the PCI Express and DisplayPort protocols. There's also a limited number of compatible peripherals available on the market thanks to Apple's previous exclusivity. That said, Intel stated that it plans to add Thunderbolt support in its chipset for the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors slated to arrive in desktops and laptops early next year. These will be used in Intel's ultrabook design, but currently it's unclear if Ivy Bridge-based models will actually sport Intel's Thunderbolt tech.
As previously reported, Thunderbolt -- which is viewed as an alternative to USB 3.0 -- was originally labeled Light Peak and designed to use fiber optics instead of the current copper wiring. But in order to reduce the cost for manufacturers and consumers, Intel resorted to using the cheaper copper wiring method (which actually works better than originally expected). In fact, Intel has now indicated that copper may be the wiring of choice for the foreseeable near future.
"[Fiber optics is] going to be way out," said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in an interview at the Intel Developer Forum. "At the end of the day it's all about how much speed people need versus how much they would be willing to pay. Copper will continue to improve, which happens. There have been many technologies that had been predicted dead 20 years ago that are still making good progress. We'll see."

Funny how priorities change
I'm with ya, I don't understand most of the above comments. Intel is pushing a new technology that offers to be amazingly convenient and fast, yet these people are hating on it? Must be because it was adopted by Apple first and the ignorant Apple-mongers that peruse this site so often can't understand anything more complex than "Apple sucks."
The original idea behind Lightpeak (thunderbolt is just too lame a name to switch to!) was that it would be one interconnect for all devices, and all protocols. The idea was that you could run ethernet, usb, firewire, eSATA, PCIe, and other popular interconnects through one daisy chain.
In reality it has fallen far short of this, but it is still very fast and has much more potential than USB (1.2GB/s vs 600MB/s). I would absolutely love to have one cable for everything. I hate having a bunch of cables, and then 8 flavor of USB for my devices.
Don't know about other people, but I'll only stop complaining about it when I hear Intel has licensed Thunderbolt to other manufacturers, like AMD and ARM.
In fact, PS/2 hung on for a very long time only because mice and keyboards used to be cheaper to make for PS/2 that USB. PS/2's specialized purpose and precious laptop port real estate finally killed it off.
Instead, expect that Thunderbolt will succeed in the extreme high-end for specialized devices, USB and Thunderbolt to battle it out in mid-range devices, and USB to dominate on the low-end. USB will continue to dominate the market for years due to it's sheer current market volume. It will have plenty of time to come out with a 4.0 version that could compete head to head with Thunderbolt. Whether that actually happens or succeeds is another matter.
Sony has been using this tech in their Vaio Z2 for several months now, so it is not exclusive to apple.
if ivy bridge will support both usb 3.0 and thunderbolt then no problems, but if it only supports thunderbolt then i can see issue, and extremely important if you look further down the line intel plans on integrating the south bridge directly into the CPU die, making it costlier and possibly harder to implement usb 3.0 via 3rd party
Promise already has their Pegasus line of Thunderbolt RAID appliances (and a spiffy Fiber Channel to Thunderbolt adapter). I'm hoping they see a lot of competition in this space.
But for the rest of us who actually used more than 1Gbps need thunderbolt and not USB 3.0
Our 9TB 5 Drive NAS shared across 50+ computers.. 1Gbps, USB 3.0 is insufficient even eSATA..
lol so your sharing a single NAS across 50+ computer and you seriously think thunderbolt can solve your problems....... i would have thought a distributed file server would have been a better solution
and if you paid attention no one is complain about getting more speed from the BUS, it's the fact that intel is exerting their market dominance to supplant a industry standard, once USB goes the way of firewire what stops Intel from using thunderbolt to force people to fall into line, they have done it in the past using their CPUs and the BUS has far more reaching impact then just the CPU