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Thunderbolt Has P.C Coming-Out Party at Computex  

Hardware Canucks > Events > Computex 2012 > Thunderbolt Has P.C Coming-Out Party at Computex
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Posted by Sam Reynolds — June 8th, 2012, 2:48 PM

Wander away from the phalanx of manufactures hawking ultabooks and tabets ready for Windows 8, and you’ll find the other emerging story of Computex – the coming-out party of Intel’s Thunderbolt on P.C hardware.

Much like the FireWire port of yore, Thunderbolt – originally known by the code name of “Light Peak” – began its life in the world of in the refreshed Macbook Pro line in February of 2011.

From a technical perspective, Thunderbolt is two cables capable of bidirectional data transfer in one: a fast PCI Express cable for transferring data and a DisplayPort cable for driving an attached display.

According to claims made by Apple and Intel in press materials, Thunderbolt is capable of 10Gbps of sustained transfer in either direction. This makes it 12 times faster than the latest FireWire protocol, FireWire 800, and 20 times faster than USB 2.0.

In past press materials, Intel has emphasized that Thunderbolt very well could be the ‘one port to rule them all’.

“All Thunderbolt technology devices share a common connector, and let individuals simply daisy-chain their devices one after another, connected by electrical or optical cables,” Intel said in an earlier press release.

Now that Intel has released its next generation of Thunderbolt controllers, P.C component manufactures have quickly picked up on the trend and have put a number of Thunderbolt equipped motherboards into the production cycle:  Gigabyte, ASUS, ASRock, MSI, and other major OEMs all have pledged support to produce Thunderbolt boards.

Considering that the de-facto theme of Computex is the ultrabook, Intel has played-up the role of Thunderbolt as the “ultrabook ‘amplifier’”. Thunderbolt could be an enabler of greater display and storage potential for an ultrabook, giving the device much more potential.

For Intel, the challenge with Thunderbolt will be how to make it competitive with USB 3.0. The introduction of Thunderbolt has followed many of the same steps of FireWire – a protocol that has been having an extended funeral after continuing to loose its market share and device support year-over-year to USB 2.0.

Intel’s director of marketing, Jason Ziller, isn’t overly worried about Thunderbolt following the path of FireWire.

“We expect Thunderbolt to be complementary to USB 3.0,” he said at Computex press conference. “We expect to see them co-existing on PCs. When you have them both, you really don’t need anything else.”

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  • Gbakmars

    One has to ask the question when it comes to the somewhat strange introduction of “Thunderbolt” to hardware such as motherboards, for as of yet there isn’t a person in the typical American home that owns one single item that is Thunderbolt dependent, enhanced, or in need of the speed it offers.
    Ironically “thunder” is something that is a “byproduct” of an electrical discharge that takes place in the atmosphere and although it is just too difficult for the human eye to keep up with the speed, the separation of + and – charges results in a flash of intense electrical activity producing enormous amounts of heat and it begins from the ground up. There is a rapid heating and thus an expansion of the atmosphere which sends air hurtling through the atmosphere at enormous speeds resulting in a loud boom as the has moving air comes into contact with our ear drums. But the real phenomenon is the incredible display of light as oppositely charged particles can no longer stand to be separated from each other.
    Is it possibly prophetic that the item that Intel is bragging about, because it wasn’t named “Lightning bolt”, is destined to be another fire wire? I can’t tell you how difficult it was to get Firewire 800 installed on my PC a few years ago, until I finally found a company called Unibrain. Most PC people didn’t even know what IEEE 1394b was and the PC OEM’s like Dell never even considered it to be an option for their PC sales.
    Why was only Mac big on fire wire technology? And if only Mac has a Thunderbolt connection to its monitors are we saying that the past 5 years of Monster HDMI cables, followed by a Display Port cable that was seldom found on display are going to be replaced by a technology that Mac has been using for some time, just as they were the only ones relying heavily on improving Firewire speed?
    I don’t think so. Thunderbolt has one purpose and only one purpose and you saw the perfect example of its purpose used to an extreme when Asus came out with their V Premium that should have been “famous” for Asus finally being honest with its customers and letting them know that the V Pro and V Deluxe were a 16 lane shadily advertised disappointment of a motherboard, and V Premium was in fact bringing something much greater than a bolt of thunder to the enthusiast community; they were bring the possibility of X16/X16 or X16/X8/X8 or the crown jewel of gaming-quad sli with X8/X8/X8/x8. But even with this major break though thanks to the PLX hack, you still have to ask, ‘if 3.0 is twice 2.0, but we have to cut 3.0 in half, than is are quad really nothing more than the equivalent of quad sli in 2.0?
    So why the timely addition to a bunch of failures of Z77 motherboards; add a feature that is like buying a CD player before there are CD’s, and only talk about Thunderbolt and ignore the greatest break though,(or should I say the first honest provision of a technology that was withheld in the first round of the majority of Z77 boards ( exceptions being the $400 boards like the Rampage IV Extreme)?
    You can’t attend a big event where everyone is strutting their “latest and greatest” and not be able to announce that we are going to get to transfer information 20 times faster than USB 2.0; granted none of us have anything in our possession that we can plug such a cable into. And we have no assurance that just because someone is slinging around a cable that is: how does this sound- only 2 times faster than USB 3.0, the reality is that no one may want it because it means that all of those new USB 3.0 items we have gotten all excited about would have to be rejected in preference to a “dream” of the kind where “lightning only strikes one”.
    As of now people are still finally finding reliable and honestly priced HDMI cables. USB 3.0 is still found only on portable hard drives and it is taking quite some time for it to become a household name. eSATA has proven to be 6GB/sec and is very handing and being used in Networks and transfers to external hard drives. And what is the real deal with Display Port? I have my doubts as it doesn’t really claim the speeds and bandwidth of HDMI that is now up to 20GB. Display Port may be exactly as the name implies; it will be an invention that will be placed on display at the Computer Hall of Fame, filed under “underachievers”.
    If this new cable is going to change computing as we know it than I suggest that we change the name to “Lightning Bolt”?