AMD Does Not Believe in Intel's Thunderbolt.
Advanced Micro Devices, the second largest supplier of x86 microprocessors on the globe and the designer of half of the world's discrete graphics adapters, said that Intel Corp.'s recently introduced Thunderbolt input/output technology will become just another proprietary standard with not a lot of chances to be adopted widely. The chip designer also doubted that the TB actually brings any tangible improvements.
"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.
