Intel announces “Thunderbolt™ ready” upgrade program for PC motherboards, desktops and workstation computers

Intel blogs by Dan Snyder

The past year has seen a flurry of Thunderbolt™ related activity. Already present on every current Apple Mac*, Thunderbolt has continued to grow within PC circles. And the Thunderbolt ecosystem responded, with over 100 Thunderbolt devices now shipping and available, most certified for both Mac and PC. Thunderbolt makes new experiences possible and developers are seeking to take advantage of Thunderbolt’s key benefits, including simultaneous data and display transfer, with speeds of up to 10Gbps, and daisy-chain connectivity of up to six devices. Building upon that foundation, the first Thunderbolt™ 2 systems were introduced in October this year, with speeds up to 20Gbps, and support for the DisplayPort 1.2 protocol. Thunderbolt is clearly the fastest, most versatile connection to your PC.

Now we have a new announcement for you — an exciting new program to quickly expand the footprint of Thunderbolt for desktop and workstation users. This new initiative is called “Thunderbolt ready”, and it enables PC manufacturers to offer Thunderbolt upgradeable motherboards within desktop and workstation computers. By using a Thunderbolt card, Thunderbolt’s blazing fast speed and uncompressed video capabilities can now be added to any motherboard that includes a GPIO header (general purpose input/output header), so even if your system doesn’t have Thunderbolt it is now possible to “upgrade” to it. Users that are interested in adding Thunderbolt 2 technology to an existing Thunderbolt ready system can combine a Thunderbolt card with a growing number of enabled motherboards, all identified by the use of the “Thunderbolt ready” moniker. The Thunderbolt ready program makes it simple to identify which components work together to upgrade your PC with Thunderbolt 2 capability.Thunderbolt ready logo

The addition of a Thunderbolt ready card to a PC is a simple and straight forward process. All a user needs to do is connect the Thunderbolt card into the designated PCIe slot, connect a cable to the GPIO header, and utilize an available DP (DisplayPort) out connector from the motherboard processor graphics, or an external graphics card, depending on the system. And since a Thunderbolt card comes with all the necessary cables, software, and instructions, upgrading is a breeze. read more...