Intel has scheduled a press event in San Francisco today to announce the official release of its Thunderbolt (originally code-named "Light Peak") technology, which was conceived as a new, consumer-friendly way to transfer data at previously unheard-of speeds—and which could single-handedly replace the many protocols PCs use today (such as FireWire, HDMI, SATA, SCSI, and USB).
The Intel event is being timed to coincide with Apple's announcement, of a Sandy Bridge refresh of its MacBook Pro line of laptops, and word has already filtered out that these laptops will be the first systems equipped with Light Peak—under the name of "Thunderbolt."
All this made it an ideal time to both look back and what we know about Thunderbolt, and look forward to the innovations it may bring computer users in 2011 and beyond. To see a demonstration of Light Peak from IDF 2010, check out the YouTube video at the bottom of this story.
1. Super-fast data transmission. Thunderbolt combines the capabilities of the PCI Express (PCIe) and DisplayPort protocols, and is capable of bidirectionally transferring data between your computer and peripherals at a rate of 10 Gbps—fast enough to transfer a full-length Blu-ray movie in under 30 seconds, and more than twice the peak theoretical speed of USB 3.0 (4.8 Gbps).
2. Copper conundrum. Though Intel originally positioned Light Peak as an optical technology, PCMag reported last month that its first iteration would use copper wiring, but still hit the target 10-Gbps speeds. In addition to being cheaper and more familiar technology, this would also let Light Peak provide power to devices—something optical cabling alone can't do. Apple boasts that the Thunderbolt port can carry 10 watts of power to peripherals, so this would seem to have come to pass. How upcoming versions of Thunderbolt deal with this problem remains to be seen.
3. The future will be faster. Intel has claimed that, within the next decade, it should be possible for Thunderbolt technology to eventually scale up to a speed of 100 Gbps. (It's unlikely that this speed could be achieved without optical cabling, however.)
4. Re-porting for duty. Though Thunderbolt is designed to work with other data transmission protocols (see below), ports will have to be specially designed to take full advantage of its speed capabilities. The Thunderbolt port on the new MacBooks is identical to a Mini DisplayPort jack, so any Mini DisplayPort cable—or adapter—should work in it.
5. The magic of miniaturization. Thunderbolt has been made possible by Intel's miniaturizing the necessary optical transceiver, which converts electricity to light and vice versa, to about the dimensions of a dime.
6. Inside the tech. This transceiver contains two tiny Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) lasers and photo detectors. The lasers are 250 microns wide—or the width of two human hairs—and transmit light over each channel using fiber-optic cable 125 microns wide. The photo detectors receive the light from the other end of the channels.
7. No breach of protocol. An Intel-provided controller chip provides protocol-switching capabilities so that multiple protocols (such as DisplayPort and PCI Express) may be run over a single Thunderbolt cable. As many as seven devices may be daisy chained together via Thunderbolt cabling.
8. Longer cables. It's something of a moot point now given the use of copper, but Thunderbolt as fully envisioned could use cables much longer than what we see today—light does not degrade over long distances the way electricity does. Completely optical Thunderbolt cables could measure up to about 100 meters, or 328 feet, in length. For comparison, USB cables are limited to maximum lengths of five meters (about 16.5 feet).
9. A long time coming. Intel first introduced Thunderbolt as Light Peak at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2009. Intel's lack of support for USB 3.0 on its new second-generation Core ("Sandy Bridge") processing platform and Steve Jobs' declaration last year that Apple didn't "see USB 3 taking off at this time" have only splashed accelerant on the speculation that Light Peak would try to supplant USB 3.0 in the market.
10. Peripheral development. One of the very few peripherals announced so far for use with Thunderbolt is the LaCie Little Big Disk, which should arrive by summer. But we expect to soon see more external hard drives, as well as digital cameras and video cameras, as they're best equipped to make use of Thunderbolt's improved data rates. Until there's wider adoption in the marketplace, adapters will ensure your current devices work with this exciting new technology.