Intel
Intel made a couple of storage-related announcements at Computex 2015. The largest was the introduction of Thunderbolt 3, increasing bandwidth to 40 Gb/s. Intel also addressed one of the technology's biggest weaknesses, which has slowed adoption: cable costs. Users will be able to use passive cables for Thunderbolt devices with up to 20 Gb/s bandwidth. The full 40 Gb/s requires either active copper or optical cables.
Alpine Ridge, the new Thunderbolt 3 controller, uses four lanes of PCIe 3.0 to the host chipset. Technically it has 32 Gb/s of throughput. Intel uses 40 Gb/s for marketing though, and gets there by calculating DisplayPort bandwidth in with the chipset.
In addition to Thunderbolt, Alpine Ridge also supports USB 3.1. The combination makes for an interesting mix that spans several product categories. Historically, Thunderbolt has been used mainly for DAS storage. But those new capabilities will expand the technology's utility.
Intel also announced a change for SFF-8639 to a more friendly name: U.2. This is more of a marketing term for OEMs that plan to adapt PCIe-based storage devices in 2.5" form factors. We feel it's a plug-in replacement to the stillborn SATA Express spec that is already outdated for high-performance SSDs.