Thunderbolt Heading to Windows PCs in 2012

Intel was pushing for this not too long ago...

Funny how priorities change

OK. And this is a big deal why?

A technology for which there is little if any need and it ain't free so I'll pass.

be awesome to see this technology somehow network PC together. Be nice to be able to transfer files between 2 close proximity machines that quickly

so let me get this right, Intel may support thunderbolt (their own proprietary format) but not UBS 3.0 (industry standard format) with ivy bridge. I sure hope bulldozer's performance is compelling enough to make Intel reconsider their position on this.....

Now Intel's thunderbolt will flourish when not only 5% of the newly sold computers have support for it, bet they realized their mistake with such minuscule install base that it will never take of for real and rectified the situation!

Weired comments. I'm pretty sure Intel championed USB as well. They are just moving beyond USB with Thunderbolt. FWIW, even USB 3.0 is S-L-O-W. I have it now and it is still pitifal. I would never use it regularly for hard drive technology. eSATA is still the only way to go there but now with Thunderbolt, you have an interface for all of your hard drives, thumb drives, and any other external tech like monitors, optial drives, cameras, etc. People stuck on USB are like the people who stuck to VESA.

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."

Any word if this will support TCP/IP like firewire? Would be nice to have a 10gbps link between two systems considering the cost of 10gbps ethernet atm.

I'm stoked about this. It is actually one of the reasons why I have not jumped on upgrading this year. While USB3 is cool and all, it is a very limited application on connecting storage devices to computers.

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.

On paper, the specs for the version 1.0 Lightpeak/Thunderbolt are pretty good. Surprised there is so much negativity towards what will become a great and extremely convenient interface.

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.

I doubt that Thunderbolt will become the "one bus to rule them all". The problem is that it has poor support for low-end devices (ex: mice and keyboards). The chips cost too much and are too complex. Firewire was also once predicted to become the "one bus to rule them all" (I know people who worked on Firewire-based backplane computers in the 90s) but it also dropped the ball on low-end devices as well. This is a major reason why USB won over Firewire (among others).

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.

"Thunderbolt has been an exclusively-licensed feature on Apple's Macintosh computers"

Sony has been using this tech in their Vaio Z2 for several months now, so it is not exclusive to apple.

The negatives are not about whether the tech is better or not, it aimed directly at Intel using their market dominance to supplant an industry standard with one of their proprietary standard (which you will have to pay Intel to implement)

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

I'd love to see this utilized as a low-cost alternative to Fiber Channel for interfacing with storage devices (Home-brew SAN/NAS boxes, etc...).

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.

95% of people complaining about Thunderbolt actually never used more than 1GBps of Ethernet speed.

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..

@RazorBurn

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

About time! I hope it will arrive in a form of a PCI-E card, because I don't want to change the motherboard just to get this. And I totally welcome this tech; it's just sad that Apple got it first for some reason (not only got it, but also no one else was allowed to use it).

yay the useless gimmick apple has is finally getting some support on the pc....

yay the useless gimmick apple has is finally getting some support on the pc....

Troll much? Apple hasn't invented this "gimmick" (when did THEY ever come up with something new?), Intel has, and I have dismissed the claims about their "collaboration" - the only "collaboration" they had is Apple bribing Intel nicely so that the tech doesn't make it to true innovators (*cough* Asus *cough*) in time.

Thunderbolt is not useless, it is faster than USB 3.0 and has the potential to become even faster in the future, according to Intel.



Is eSATA actually faster than USB 3.0? I've never used either... must try them out soon.

So Intel is now in a situation where they are stuck between USB3.0 and Light Peak.

They're not; Light Peak aka Thunderbolt is more promising than USB 3.0 and Intel chipsets still don't support USB 3.0 natively. I'd say that Thunderbolt will become native to their newer chipsets and USB 3.0 will be kept with third-party controllers (NEC, ASMedia and whatever they're using nowadays for USB 3.0) or disappear fully, because USB 2.0 devices won't benefit from 3.0 and 3.0 devices might as well shift to Thunderbolt.

Though, I think I've heard of Intel promising to add USB 3.0 native support in their next chipset... don't know if that claim still stands, though; I've heard it before Thunderbolt and when it came out, I understood why Intel delayed USB 3.0 implementation.

best use for this ever is:
external desktop gpu for laptops.


think about it, when you game you need big screen and your gaming mouse and your sound system, none of which is good to carry on with you...

so you could have this neat ultrabook with it's superb core i7 and big chunk of ram.. and shitty hd3000 and when you get back home you plug to external gpu via thunderbolt which connects to the big screen you have and bam your laptop can game hardcore

thats my dream, just one computer, an ultrabook, which i can take with me easily.. and still the ability to game hardcore

you are just like people saying "who needs more then 640k of memory" .. see what i wrote in the above

Yes, indeed. I'd love to have that for my old laptop - all I need is to be able to LAN some old games with decent FPS which is not achievable with its Intel GMA... (more like Intel GMS) but would work if it had an external GPU. I saw one made by Asus but it didn't meed any success because it used the ExpressCard for connecting and it's way too slow. I believe that now the thing can be easily re-made and be successful - just like you suggested.

This will go the way of FireWire. USB is universal. Millions and millions of devices support it and it's backwards compatible ontop of that with older generations of USB devices. The avg pc consumor looks for compatabilty in a device first and formost. Thunderbolt is neither universal or backwards compatible with anything, which is why it's going to end up failing. The irony to all this is that Intel is comepeting against the very same product that they helped create.

FireWire didn't "fail". It just became more rare, that's all. If the average dumb consumer doesn't see the benefit, I don't think that should slow the progress down. I want this on the next generation of motherboards, and on PCI-E cards. "Average consumer" can't tell a shortcut from a file, doesn't know about the existence of help files and is afraid of assembling his own machine, although there's extensive help available on the net and the process is similar to playing LEGOs - everything goes in its own slot, and if it doesn't fit, try another part... xD

sorry mate that wont work for you
a) your old laptop dont have ... thunderbolt
b) you need not just a good gpu to game you also need a proper cpu and ram so even if your old laptop had thunderbolt it wouldnt work


i want this not in order to save myselff the need of buing new pc every year, i want this so i could just work with one computer


there will always be the next generaion of pci-e which will mean .. a new "cage" will be needed every few years
new gpus\cpus will become avilable rendering to correct gpu and laptop old so new one will be needed every other year

its all fine with me
so long i get to work from one computer instead of 2 or even 3

First, I was just giving it as an EXAMPLE. My laptop could certainly achieve more if its Intel GMA950 would be replaced with something better (seen laptops with less RAM, slower CPUs and better GPUs which gamed waaaay better...) Second, it doesn't have Thunderbolt, no really?! Of course not. As I said, it was an example. It wouldn't save me from getting a desktop, but would have allowed me to improve the quality of LAN parties