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."

Comments

Insecure by Nature

[Hydrian]

Just like Apple's previous external bus, FireWire, Light Peak/Thunderbolt has an inherent security issue. Both of these buses allow DMA access. This makes it relatively trivial put on some type of password/PIN sniffer hardware. I wouldn't plan on using any Thunderbolt hardware unless the physical security is reliable. So to me, this is a useless technology on netbooks, notebooks, tables, etc...