While historically Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 had narrow adoption, Thunderbolt 3 has already become more common than its predecessors. Thunderbolt 3 switched away from a Mini DislayPort connector to a USB-C type connection, and is capable of data transfer speeds of 40Gbit/s. Intel announced Thunderbolt™ 3 during a keynote speech at Computex 2015. The first PC manufacturers to bring Windows-based products to market released Thunderbolt 2 based skus that same year.
#INTEL THUNDERBOLT 3 EXTERNAL GRAPHICS PRO#
A key feature of Thunderbolt 2 was always backwards compatibility, and Thunderbolt 2 used the same cables as the original Thunderbolt.Īpple was among the first companies to release products supporting the new protocol, with its 2013 Retina Macbook Pro laptops. Thunderbolt™ 2 was announced in 2013, and offered 20Gbit/s (double that of its predecessor,) by optimizing and aggregating data sent over the cable’s multiple channels. In 2011 Apple launched new SKUs of the Macbook Pro which were the first commercially available products with Thunderbolt capability, and followed that with announcement of Thunderbolt-capable iMacs later that year. Thunderbolt supported 10Gbit/s of bandwidth and utilized the Mini DisplayPort connector. Thunderbolt™ eventually became the official name for the technology, and in 2011 the first products supporting it shipped. That’s not a huge deal by today’s standards, but it was seriously impressive for the time. Intel demonstrated that one cable could interact with multiple downstream devices by simultaneously sending HD video to a monitor while also sending data to a hard drive. The very first iteration of what would eventually become Thunderbolt debuted in 2009. Although third generation Thunderbolt is relatively new to the market, (some of the first Thunderbolt 3 devices became available in late 2015) the basic idea wasn’t even born in this decade.