Though you’re probably hearing about it for the first time now, Intel’s been working on a new interconnection technology for the last few years. “Light Peak”, it is now called “Thunderbolt” and is a revolution of data transfer technologies.
How fast is fast? We are talking about 10 Gigabit per second transfers whether you’re uploading or downloading. So give or take say you want to copy 500 Gigabytes worth of movies and music, you don’t have to spend hours upon hours copying content, you could copy all that content in less than a minute!
The only real problems that i can see at the moment is apple’s insistence on making thunderbolt technology exclusive for a year on their own their devices, meaning you will have to wait a while longer before this technology becomes mainstream.Another problem is that this technology is going cost big bucks. I don’t think normal people that do not keep a vast amount of content will see any real value in thunderbolt.
The Thunderbolt 4 connection offers some fantastic improvements when compared to the previous generation of Thunderbolt 3.
Thunderbolt is becoming USB4?
For the last few years, Intel and Apple have worked to create an ecosystem around Intel’s Thunderbolt interface, formerly known as Light Peak. The first generation Thunderbolt interface offered four independent lanes at 10Gbps down a single cable, while Thunderbolt 2 allowed those lanes to be combined into two 20Gbps channels.
Ports like these don't necessarily have to be made for consumers, as long as it has a strong niche like the prosumer market. While Firewire never really took off, it was still used a lot by professionals especially with A/V hardware, and it seems Thunderbolt might eventually go that route as well.
The potential uses for Thunderbolt/Lightpeak are pretty cool, But it's not completely exclusive to Apple. Lightpeak/Thunderbolt is now appearing on some Sony hardware as well. What's especially interesting to me is the potential of using external GPU's especially with something like an ultraportable (The Viao Z is able to do this).
You're math is wrong.
"So give or take say you want to copy 500 Gigabytes worth of movies and music, you don’t have to spend hours upon hours copying content, you could copy all that content in less than a minute!"
10 Gigabits = 1.25 Gigabytes so in one minute you would have only transferred/copied 75 Gigabytes of data.
For that reason I'm not going to waste my time with the rest of the article.
i think thunderbolt useage will be for thing like the sony viao z where they have a power dock which houses a discrete graphics card and extra ram and connected through thunderbolt very interesting implementation imo