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Thunderbolt On Windows: Hardware and Performance Explored
MojoKid writes "Intel's Light Peak technology eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. It wasn't a huge surprise that Apple got an early exclusivity agreement, but there were actually a number of other partners on board as well, including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital. On the Windows front, Thunderbolt is still in its infancy and though there are still a few bugs to work out of systems and solutions, Thunderbolt capable motherboards and devices for Windows are starting to come to market. Performance-wise in Windows, the Promise RAID DAS system tested here offers near 1GB/s of peak read throughput and 500MB/s for writes, which certainly does leave even USB 3.0 SuperSpeed throughput in the dust."
What I expect from Thunderbolt is not to use it as a link to a storage device, but to a graphic card. This way you could have a CPU and memory heavy laptop to carry around, but then you could dock it at home and connect it to the external graphic card and play some video games.
Apparently this interface can do 10 Gbps, and that sounds like a good start.
OEMs are more pragmatic than that. If it's a salable tech that is already developed and offered by a major player like Intel, they'll use it, whether it smells of Apple seconds or not.
With an IOMMU in between, which the OS can use to protect sensitive memory.
No it's been a year of geeks like you claiming that Thunderbolt was somehow an Apple technology when it was not. It is an always has been Intel technology; Apple helped Intel develop it. Apple did not get an exclusionary deal for their efforts; they simply got a year head start on all the other computer manufacturers. In that year others have implemented it. OEMs have been slower no doubt because some have wondered if I was worth implementing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's all true of the PCI-E slots you already have on your motherboard. Do you hot glue those too?