Intel’s Thunderbolt Technology Is Coming to Non-Mac PCs
It has been nearly a year since chipmaker Intel teamed up with Apple to bring the Thunderbolt combined data-and-video port to the Mac — and so far, only the Mac.
This is the port that gives Macs profoundly fast connections to external hard drives that support the technology, and which also drives high-end displays on a single shared connection.
Now there’s word out of Taiwan’s Digitimes that Intel is going to bring the technology to other PC makers as soon as April of 2012. Sony, Asustek and Acer are said to be among the first in line for Thunderbolt. Missing from that list, however, are such major PC makers as Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Apple, which has a long history of being early to adopt input-output technologies — it was the first to put USB ports on its PCs with the first iMac in 1998, and it invented FireWire — has had Thunderbolt exclusively on the Mac since it debuted new MacBooks in February. Intel reached out to Apple in 2009 in order to popularize the technology, which was originally known as Light Peak.