Intel to Integrate Thunderbolt 3, Eliminate Royalties
Intel today announced that it plans to drive large-scale mainstream adoption of Thunderbolt by releasing the protocol’s specification to the industry next year under a nonexclusive, royalty-free license.
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Intel also revealed plans to integrate Thunderbolt 3 into its future CPUs, but it didn’t provide a timeline as to when. The all-in-one design will take up less space on a Mac or PC’s logic board, and reduce power consumption by eliminating the need for a standalone Thunderbolt controller.
Hopefully this isn’t too late to avoid a FireWire-like fate.
Update (2017-05-31): Colin Cornaby:
FWIW I think Thunderbolt 3 is seeing a lot more success on the PC side than Firewire ever did, and it’s still growing.
So that’s the weird thing is that the PC companies have been shipping a whole bunch of docks. Meantime the Mac is a mess.
The higher end PC docks have GPUs, which isn’t supported under macOS. Apple blocked certain chipsets. Other stuff seems glitch on macOS.
