Tuesday, December 27th 2011
Intel Thunderbolt To Go Beyond Macs in April 2012
Intel notified its partners in the PC industry that its Thunderbolt 10 Gbps interconnect will enter the PC ecosystem in April, 2012. Around that time, Intel will launch its third-generation Core processor family, and waves of new motherboards are likely to launch. It is likely that Thunderbolt will be the defining feature of many of these motherboards. Along with PC motherboards, the technology is likely to feature on pre-built desktops, and notebooks. The propagation of Thunderbolt is limited for a variety of reasons. First, its host controller costs more than $20, second, there already an established ecosystem of USB 3.0, a slower, yet competitive interconnect that maintains backwards compatibility with its older versions, and third, Intel has restricted the technology to Apple.
The cost of adoption, starting with host controllers, is expected to drop in the second half of 2012, and so the technology should standardize gradually in the future. 10 Gbps might be more than plenty of bandwidth for now, but the demand for faster device interconnects will only rise. Among the companies that have come forward with plans to adopt the technology, Sony is expected to adopt it among many of its product lines; ASUS into its high-end notebooks, and so will Gigabyte. Gigabyte will also embrace the technology for its motherboards in April, in a bid to increase competitiveness against ASUS and ASRock. Thunderbolt will be the next "features USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s" marketing label for motherboard vendors.
Source:
DigiTimes
The cost of adoption, starting with host controllers, is expected to drop in the second half of 2012, and so the technology should standardize gradually in the future. 10 Gbps might be more than plenty of bandwidth for now, but the demand for faster device interconnects will only rise. Among the companies that have come forward with plans to adopt the technology, Sony is expected to adopt it among many of its product lines; ASUS into its high-end notebooks, and so will Gigabyte. Gigabyte will also embrace the technology for its motherboards in April, in a bid to increase competitiveness against ASUS and ASRock. Thunderbolt will be the next "features USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s" marketing label for motherboard vendors.
28 Comments on Intel Thunderbolt To Go Beyond Macs in April 2012
Intel worked it out to get the speeds without needing optical cables so that makes it cheaper for us to buy. Plus I heard you can still get the optical cabling but it will cost more.
At any rate this is good news. Now to see if it will become ubiquitous!
I it's on the Z77 boards with Ivy Bridge, consider a upgrade!
www.anandtech.com/show/3834/intels-silicon-photonics-50g-silicon-photonics-link/1
So they are exactly where they said they would be, but with a cheaper, copper medium. Where's the problem again? No one claimed this would be 100Gbps out of the box (or even 50, or 40) in the first gen.
Care to share the source that says "It's almost always HDDs/SSDs holding InfiniBand/Thunderbolt back"? Specially since there are no 10Gb Thunderbolt NICs available in the first place.
The wiki article will give you a rough idea, but again, its not a "source"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Thunderbolt