SillyDog701

[Antony]

According to Electronista, Intel's Thunderbolt technology is not exclusive to Apple, and expecting other companies to have the device by early 2012.

Thunderbolt may now give it a clear speed edge for any external storage, even trumping USB 3.0 and external SATA.

Intel also shed some of Thunderbolt's future...
Daisy-chaining could involve a Cinema Display or other DisplayPort screen, but only if the device is the last on the chain. Both optical and electrical cables will work, but the features they allow vary wildly. The wired connection supplies the expected 10W of power but can only go up to three meters (9.8 feet) in length. Optical cables, since they only transmit light, don't supply power but can go up to "tens of meters," Intel said. Optical cables are due later in the year.

The technology only supports 10Gbps for now, but it already has scaling built in, according to Intel. Where a current Thunderbolt link is two lanes, it can work with as many as two lanes in each direction, scaling up to 20Gbps symmetrically or 40Gbps if all traffic flows in one direction.

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[Mandrake]

There's one use that I think Thunderbolt is going to be absolutely great for. For years now, we've seen various companies try their hand at producing external graphics solutions for portables.

The premise is fantastic, in theory you would use integrated graphics while out and about for great battery life and low power consumption. Then you could home home, plug your notebook into a large LCD monitor or HDTV and plug in this external graphics card. Your notebook would instantly be turned into a fearsome gaming machine capable playing the newest great games like Dragon Age 2.

Unfortunately, it never really worked out that way. There were a few problems that were never really solved. The first attempts tried to make graphics cards that worked with existing notebooks, they generally used an ExpressCard connection. The problem with this was that ExpressCard may have already been in a lot of notebooks, but it didn't offer anywhere near enough bandwidth to produce good performance.

AMD/ATI took a different approach, but they also didn't achieve much success. To ensure that bandwidth wasn't a concern, AMD developed a new interface for their external graphics solutions. This connection used 8 PCIe lines (PCIe 8x), so there was enough bandwidth to get good performance for external graphics solutions. The problem in this case was that the connection was brand new, and was only on a handful of AMD powered notebook computers. AMD said, at the time, that they were open to working with other companies to see this implemented on more notebooks. Unfortunately, that never really happened.

Thunderbolt will change all that. I love the fact that it's totally forward looking and is massively scalable in the future. With Thunderbolt being widely adopted over the next few years, we'll finally have an external connector on many notebooks that's ideal for external graphics card solutions. The inner-geek in me says this is just the coolest thing to come along in a long time. Kudos to Intel for developing it, and Kudos to Apple for being the first to adopt it. (though they still need USB3 )

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