Intel'sThunderbolt to Strike PCs in April, Says Report
Intel'sThunderbolt to Strike PCs in April, Says Report
Posted 12/27/2011 at 5:58am
| by Pulkit Chandna
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With Ivy Bridge chipsets receiving USB 3.0 certification recently, Intel is now all set to support the technology natively with its next-generation processor platform. But it isn’t the only data transfer technology that Intel plans to support. According to a new report, Intel’s Thunderbolt technology will strike the PC market in April 2012.
The chipmaker is said to have notified its partners across the PC industry about its intention to fully roll out the Thunderbolt I/O technology next year; it’s currently restricted to a few Apple products. As per Digitimes’ sources, a number of A-list PC vendors are already on board and getting ready to launch Thunderbolt-compatible motherboards, laptops and desktops.
Further, the sources expect the cost of adopting Thunderbolt to come down considerably in 2012, paving the way for its standardization. At the moment, a Thunderbolt chip costs in excess of $20. Despite Digitimes’ reputation of being a rumormonger, this report does not seem farfetched, as Intel is already on record as saying that it sees both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt as being "complementary" and wants developers to support both.
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QuadraQ
December 28, 2011 at 3:36pm
This is good news for both USB 3.0 (which is a natural and important step forward for USB) and Thunderbolt, which has the potential to create completely new possibilities for peripherals much like USB did when it finally caught on. Imagine external GPU's for laptops for example, that could give you high end gaming performance at home, while still letting the laptop be very light and portable for the road.
Captain_Steve
December 27, 2011 at 6:42am
Sweet; this means my PC will have another port that requres another cable I will eventually need for some device. That's great, because e-sata, usb 2.0, usb 3.0, and Fire Wire weren't giving me enough conflicting standards to deal with.
And before anyone tries to point out that the reason for this is to create one superior, universal standard:
http://xkcd.com/927/
ocnier
December 27, 2011 at 6:54am
I feel your pain, however, thunderbolt really does stand to be "the one ring to rule them all" especially for the non-copper based glass/optical version. It would essentially replace every output on the computer with a possible lone exception of ethernet jack and even that is 50/50. I'm looking forward to it personally, but it will suck in about 5 years to get new monitors with this proprietary jack. The glass version gets you a theoretical limit of 10gig/sec. That is enough bandwidth overhead to stand for at least a decade or more.
Captain_Steve
December 27, 2011 at 8:10am
It's not just getting it on the computer, it's getting all the peripheal makers to play ball. I don't see Samsung and Motorola jumping on the bandwagon and outfitting cell phones with Thunderbolt for charging, so I'm still going to have an USB port for my cell phone. Like wise, unless hard drive makers are going to switch from SATA to thunderbolt internal hard drives, we're still going to have eSata (since it's just an extension of normal Sata). That isn't to say that an all Thunderbolt PC wouldn't be awesome, it's just that aligning all your other stuff to be Thunderbolt is going to be much more difficult.
Engelsstaub
December 27, 2011 at 6:13am
GOOD.
I hate how the (few) current vendors of Thunderbolt peripherals are charging ridiculous "Mac" prices for them thinking Macintosh users will just pay up. The arrival of Thunderbolt ports in the Win-PC world should introduce these unscrupulous vendors to a measure of sanity. I hear Thunderbolt works well under Windows 7. If that's the case then this is nothing but win for users of both platforms.
My next PC-purchase will support one of those A-List PC vendors.
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