Intel aims for faster Thunderbolt with PCI-Express 3.0
Intel is working to boost data transfer speeds with a faster pipe on Thunderbolt, a high-speed connector technology that link computers with peripherals, the company said on Thursday. — Intel is working to boost data transfer speeds …
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel spent 2011 positioning Thunderbolt as the premium answer to USB 3.0 — a single cable carrying both data and display traffic — but adoption beyond Apple's Macs stayed thin while the USB camp scaled cheaply, a standoff captured in its earlier USB 3.0-versus-Thunderbolt roadmap statements from April 2011.
The PCIe 3.0 upgrade lands just as Intel's broader PC-redefinition push hits a crucial phase: the company is betting on sleek portables framed as the industry's answer to Apple's MacBook Air, and Taiwan PC makers have rumored an Ivy Bridge processor wave of some 25 models arriving around early April 2012. A faster Thunderbolt pipe gives those thin machines a differentiating high-speed I/O story at exactly the moment their silicon refreshes.
First-order effects
- Peripheral and storage vendors building Thunderbolt devices gain headroom to design around higher sustained throughput, since the connector's bottleneck shifts upward with the PCIe 3.0 pipe rather than the protocol itself.
- Apple, Thunderbolt's launch partner, gets a faster interconnect path for the display-plus-storage workloads its machines were first built to showcase, keeping its I/O advantage over mainstream Wintel laptops intact.
Second-order effects
- The USB 3.0 camp faces renewed pressure to compete on bandwidth rather than cost alone, since Thunderbolt's speed argument gets harder to dismiss each time Intel widens the underlying pipe.
- Ultrabook makers gain another lever to justify premium pricing on thin portables — useful leverage given confirmed reports that Intel and Microsoft are unwilling to cut their hardware and software quotes for Wintel tablets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, external connectivity consolidates around a single converged cable carrying PCIe-grade data plus display output, eroding the separate-port model of desktop expansion.
- I/O bandwidth becomes a platform-differentiation battleground controlled by whoever owns both the silicon generation and the connector standard — in this case Intel — rather than by peripheral vendors.
The trend: Computer interconnects are converging on one high-speed cable whose ceiling rises with each PCIe generation, turning connector technology into a competitive weapon between platform owners.