Support for Thunderbolt Strong at IDF

At the start of summer, we asked, “Is Intel’s Thunderbolt Dead in the Water?“. At that time, it seemed like that could be the case, thanks to expensive chipsets, cables and even products – not to mention a lack of products in general. With a multitude of companies supporting Thunderbolt showing off their wares at Intel’s on-going Developer Forum though, things are looking up.

First, there are a couple of vendors that have promised to begin shipping some of their desktops and notebooks with Thunderbolt; Acer and ASUS. This is a rather major win, because both companies ship a huge volume of PCs, and because of their adoption, price on the chipsets (and, ultimately the products) should begin to go down.

The folks at AnandTech took a ton of pictures of Thunderbolt apps on display at IDF, and one thing I’ve noticed is that storage devices are still the focal point. It’s almost no surprise, as little is different for USB, where taking advantage of total bandwidth is concerned.

While I do see Thunderbolt becoming more visible in the future, and pricing for it go down, I’m still not convinced that anyone aside from corporate or business users (or home users willing to spend) are going to be purchasing the products that take advantage of the available bandwidth.

During IDF, Intel gave a demonstration of transferring files with Thunderbolt on a super-fast SSD, at around 800MB/s. This if course is cool, but again, who’s this for? Few people would be willing to part with $500+ for an external SSD. A lot of people won’t splurge that for an internal SSD.

Still, it seems like the ball is rolling now, so it should only be a matter of time before we see if Thunderbolt has what it takes to overtake USB 3.0 in terms of usage.

Thanks to MacMan for the heads-up on this news!