On Thursday at Computex, Intel unveiled a prototype thumb drive which employs the Thunderbolt interface and claims data transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps. Dubbed the "world's fastest thumb drive," Intel's prototype device boasts transfer speeds far beyond those reachable by established standards such as the omnipresent USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, of which the latter attains a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 5 Gbps.

The small drive hosts a 128 GB SanDisk SSD and connects directly to a Thunderbolt port on your PC or laptop, dismissing the need for the usually expensive cables associated with Thunderbolt peripherals, typically external storage solutions but also monitors. Thunderbolt hasn't seen wide adoption yet, primarily because of high costs, both implementation costs (expensive controllers) as well as adoption costs (few and expensive compatible devices). However that could soon change, seeing how many motherboards that offer Thunderbolt support were unveiled only in the last few days at Computex, one would think that Intel's Haswell platform could accelerate Thunderbolt adoption despite lacking native chipset support for the standard.