Intel Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 Killer or Flop in the Making?
It certainly has been a rocky and hard road for Intel when it comes to their latest creation dubbed Light Peak (now known as Thunderbolt). In theory, Thunderbolt would solve a lot of consumers problems as one connector would be able (in theory) be able to provide enough bandwidth to power anything from low power, low performance devices such as keyboards and mice to super high performance external RAID arrayed storage solutions to even 3D High Definition video as it could be good for upwards of 10 Gigabits / second now and maybe even scale all the way to 100Gb/s (though this iteration is copper only so 100Gbit/s is pushing the realm of credibility a lot)! In other words, Light Peak should in theory with a universal connector that with time would allow manufactures to stick X number of LP ports on their motherboard/PC/laptop and allow the consumer to decide which one they would use for each of their peripherals. That is the theory behind Light Peak, and like most theories it has yet to be proven. This is not the first time a "universal" bus port has been tried (as USB was supposed to be a universal peripheral bus, which while ubiquitous, now has failed at its main job of "removing" other peripheral standards from the marketplace). More to the point, manufacturers are extremely conservative by nature and distrust the idea of Intel controlling the IP behind "only" port needed! This is why USB-IF told Intel to take a long walk off a short pier when Intel came sniffing around earlier this year, and why most manufactures did the same thing. This mulishness of Intel has in the short term already hurt the industry they profess to be trying to help as USB 3.0 adoption rate has been stymied mainly because of Intel (and by extension their main competitor AMD) dragging their feet! In all likelihood no one standard will ever replace all the rest and do we really need another competing standard? Wouldn't it make sense to refine the ones we have and go with the best standard for the each niche rather than a "jack of all trades" approach? Read on for full article.
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