While Apple may be the first to debut Thunderbolt, the technology is all Intel’s, and the company is not being quiet about which partners have jumped on board with the 10Gbps connection. Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital are all among the roster of firms committed to pushing out Thunderbolt-equipped devices, which will include displays, storage devices, audio/video devices, cameras, docking stations and more.
Developed as Light Peak, Intel Thunderbolt consists of a bi-directional, dual-channel 10 Gbps pipe using electrical or optical cables. Compatible with existing DisplayPort devices out of the box, it’s dual protocol – with DisplayPort and PCI Express – and allows for daisy-chaining and bus-power.
What makes the daisy-chaining special is that, thanks to the dual-channel technology, the first device still gets 10 Gbps to play with even if you then plug in a second device off the back of it. Up to six can be linked up from a single port, and with simple adapters a Thunderbolt connection can be turned into HDMI, VGA, DVI, gigabit ethernet, FireWire or USB.
We already know that Promise is readying the Pegasus RAID and LaCie a new Little Big Disk, both using Thunderbolt, and more should be announced any time now. Apple’s new MacBook Pro notebooks will go on sale today.