Thunderbolt coming to PCs soon

You guys have most likely heard of Thunderbolt which is currently featured on the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. I think Thunderbolt is a very interesting piece of technology and it seems like non-Apple computers will get it soon.


Thunderbolt is currently using a copper wire and supports up to 10 Gb/s (1.25 Gigabytes per second) per channel but Intel will move to fiber-optics based cables and connectors at the end of 2012. This is what Intel first intended (hence the name Light Peak) and this change will bump up the bandwidth to up to 20Gb/s (2.5 Gigabytes per second) per channel. For comparison, PCIe 2.0 slots has a bandwidth of 500 Megabytes per second, per lane. So a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot has a bandwidth of 8GB per seconds (a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot supports up to 16GB/s). All these numbers are full duplex by the way. PCIe 2.0 can send 500MB/s up and 500MB/s down at the same time (per lane) and Thunderbolt can send 1.25GB/s up and 1.25GB/s down at the same time (per channel).

Intel have said that devices using Thunderbolt will have either 4 or 8 Thunderbolt channels which means that low end devices which has Thunderbolt will have at least the same bandwidth as a PCIe 2.0 slot with 10 lanes.
I've discussed the performance difference between PCIe x8 and x16 on /g/ quite a bit and the truth is that ~90% of the cards on the market will lose less than ~5% performance by running at x8 instead of x16. This means that a laptop with a low end 4 channel Thunderbolt port will be able to comfortably drive a good graphics card. Especially if you take the higher bandwidth of the optical version into consideration.

I mentioned external graphics card above but another use for Thunderbolt will be docking stations. Apple is already kind of doing this with their Thunderbolt display. Having a Thunderbolt equipped Ultrabook which you dock to a big monitor while you are at home will probably be very popular in the future.

Those two things are the only real usage I see for Thunderbolt. Well, that and using it to convert to other connectors. Thunderbolt supports both the PCIe protocol, and the DisplayPort protocol. This means that you can use adapters to turn it into a lot of other connectors, such as USB 3.0 and SATA which both use the PCIe protocol.

Some high end LGA 1155 motherboards which feature copped based Thunderbolt (in my opinion pretty useless for desktops) will appear on, or shortly after the launch of Ivy Bridge.
Hopefully we'll see more Thunderbolt devices coming out, and prices to drop in the near future.