Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion cards are said to upgrade any existing PC with only 1 Thunderbolt Port. Also known as Light Peak, it offers speed up to 20GB /s with an amazingly fast I/O timings, making itself ideal for SAN and Server/Networking setups, not only this but also for home networking solution. In simpler words, Intel’s Thunderbolt is an inspiring technology, with astounding read and write speeds joint with display output technology. Regardless of superior performance, Thunderbolt technology is not being taken up on mass scale by OEMs. For this particular reason, to make it more renowned amongst enthusiasts, Intel plans to introduce Thunderbolt PCIe expansion cards.
Thunderbolt products are considered to be pretty expensive, for e.g., even the high 10 Gbps speed does not structure for such high costs. According to a brochure, which was distributed at Computex 2013, Intel’s latest Thunderbolt technology will be applied to a number of devices. Total 78 devices will have Thunderbolt – 51 external storage devices (mostly RAID such as NAS devices), one upcoming monitor by Apple, 22 digital media productions devices, three notebook dock stations and a Mac mini server.
Coming down to its specs, we come to know that the all add-in cards will be have:
• The Falcon Ridge 2C Thunderbolt controller, one standard DP input connector, one Thunderbolt connector, one GPIO header and cable and bunched internal display port loopback cable.
• Low profile PCIe x4 or higher slot for the expansion card
• Supported BIOS that can manage SMBus and alongside an internal DisplayPort output connector.
If the company takes its attention towards cutting down the prices and offering more products to have Thunderbolt support, only then it is possible that it will be able to break in the market and stand against the USB 3.0.
Images courtesy of VR-Zone.
Source: VR-Zone | News Archive