An Initial Look At Thunderbolt Technology On a PC Motherboard
AnandTech has taken a look at Thunderbolt implementation on a PC motherboard. This new, high speed connection technology co-developed by Intel and Apple has so far only been used in Apple Macs, but it’s now finally coming to PCs. Therefore, AnandTech has taken a look at an initial implementation on an MSI Z77A-GD80 motherboard. It hasn’t been formally certified yet, so while the technology shows promise, there were still a few issues to iron out, such as hot-plugging functionality not working properly.
Co-developed by Apple and Intel, Thunderbolt is a tunnel that carries both PCIe and DisplayPort traffic to the tune of 20Gbps per channel (10Gbps up and down). In the past, whenever you wanted to add a PCIe device (LAN, audio, high-speed storage, etc…) you needed to physically install that device in your system either via an ExpressCard slot on a notebook or via a PCIe slot on your desktop. Thunderbolt acts as a decoupler for PCIe devices, allowing you to put controllers that would traditionally lie inside your system outside of it, or even inside another device like a display. That’s where the DisplayPort support comes in.
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