Intel to bring thunderbolt to PCs next year

Intel has announced that its high speed 10GB/s interface known as “Thunderbolt”, (formerly known as “Light Peak”) which is currently exclusive to Apple devices until the end of 2011, will be coming to the PC market soon, most likely next year. The news was given at the Intel developers conference during a demonstration of thunderbolt on Windows 7 based Ultrabooks. The Thunderbolt interface supports hubs and the daisy chaining of up to seven compatible devices. We think it is probably likely thunderbolt will arrive with Ivy Bridge next year at the earliest, given the current arrangement Apple has with Intel.

The technology is viewed as both an alternative and a successor to USB 3.0. Intel is trying to push it into existence alongside USB 3.0. It can never succeed USB 3.0 any time soon since the costs of producing thunderbolt controllers is so expensive right now. The bandwidth it provides is double that of USB 3.0, 10GB/s as opposed to 5GB/s but currently this is almost unnecessary since very few devices need more than 5GB/s or have Thunderbolt compatibilty.

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