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Intel Drops Thunderbolt 3 Royalty, Adds CPU Integration and Works Closely With Microsoft (windowscentral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Over the last few days, Thunderbolt 3 has been a hot topic amongst Windows users especially with its notable absence with the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. Part of the problem is adoption, integration, cost, and consumer confusion according to Microsoft. Intel is aware of the current roadblocks to Thunderbolt 3 implementation, which adds 40Gbps data transfers along with charging and display support for USB Type-C. Today, the company announced numerous changes to its roadmap to speed up its adoption, including: Dropping royalty fees for the Thunderbolt protocol specification starting next year; Integrating Thunderbolt 3 into future Intel CPUs. The good news here is that Intel is dropping many of the roadblocks with today's announcement. By subtracting the licensing costs for Thunderbolt 3 and integrating into the CPU, Intel can finally push mass adoption. Getting back to Microsoft, Intel noted that the two companies are already working closely together with the latest Creators Update bringing more OS support for the protocol. Roanne Sones, general manager, Strategy, and Ecosystem for Windows and Devices at Microsoft added that such cooperation would continue with even more OS-level integration coming down the road.
I would hope so. I'd love it if the USB-C/Thunderbolt port became the new standard port that's built into everything and is used for everything. For any device you have, you will only need to plug in a single cable to a port following a single standard (excepting when you need an additional power cable). I'd even like to see it used on servers. I could see a scenario where every server in a rack is plugged into a single Thunderbolt switch/hub that provides networking, DAS/NAS/SAN, KVM, lights-out management, everything.
Just another step towards locking out any OS but Windows 10, including locking out older versions of Windows. Either that, or badly cripple the few OS's that do still run on it, likely requiring approval by MS in order to get their boot loader signed for UEFI Secure Boot.
And right while people are finding out that even Enterprise edition Windows 10 refuses to stop talking to external servers (including ad servers), even though companies pay through the nose for this specific version of Windows so that they can prevent just that sort of thing.
Make no mistake about it. Microsoft wants to own your computer, and intends on leaving you no choice in the matter, except perhaps not to own a computer at all. We're going to be seeing a lot worse coming down the pike very shortly at this rate.
Nobody wants cables to be expensive - cables are expendable goods, prone to mechanical wear out, and you need to have a lot of them to be prepared for many situations, some of which might never occur.
A connector standard that requires expensive active electronics as an integral part of any cable is sure to fail with regards to mass market penetration.