Intel's Light Peak technology eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. As we mentioned in our IDF coverage a few years ago, Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. So it wasn't a huge surprise that Apple got an early exclusivity agreement, but there were actually a number of other partners on board as well, including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital. Thunderbolt has been available on some Apple systems for over a year now and it’s been met with mostly positive results. There are also a handful of Thunderbolt compatible devices already on the market thanks to Apple’s head-start, from the likes of Promise, Lacie, WD and others.

On the Windows front, however, Thunderbolt is still in its infancy and there are still a few bugs to work out of systems and solutions. To test Thunderbolt under Windows, we got our hands on a couple of high-end motherboards that have the technology built-in, Intel's DZ77RE-75K and the Asus P8Z77-V Premium, along with a Thunderbolt-enabled Direct Attached Storage RAID system from Promise. The numbers speak for themselves. Glorious bandwidth; there is no substitute...



Link: HotHardware