AMD says no to Intel Thunderbolt technology

"Existing standards offer remarkable connectivity and together far exceed the 10Gb/s peak bandwidth of Thunderbolt. These solutions meet and exceed the bandwidth utilization of many peripherals," a spokesperson for AMD said.

AMD did not take part in the development of Thunderbolt technology and therefore will not be able to support it natively in the foreseeable future. In addition, the company does not see a lot of prospects for Thunderbolt in the short-term future as it does not substantially outperform current generation I/O technologies and sometimes even offers lower bandwidth. Coupled with the lack of devices that really take advantage of extreme throughput and the fact that Thunderbolt is a proprietary tech for now, the situation does not seem to be good for the interconnection.

"The DisplayPort1.2 standard offers up to 17Gb/s of peak bandwidth for displays. [...] Many AMD-based platforms support USB 3.0 which offers 4.8Gb/s of peak bandwidth, AMD natively supports SATA 6Gb/s with our 8-series chipsets. [Meanwhile], the total bandwidth stated for a Thunderbolt channel is only 20% higher than one PCI Express 3.0 lane and about 52% higher than a single USB 3.0 port," claimed the official for AMD.