Edible Apple

Guess who’s not happy about Thunderbolt, the moniker given to the transfer technology developed jointly by Intel and Apple? AMD.

A spokesman for AMD recently expressed doubt that Thunderbolt can actually deliver tangible improvements in performance. “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,” the spokesman said.

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.

Also, AMD didn’t hesitate to point out the current dearth of devices that support Thunderbolt.

Well, what else would you expect from AMD as an Intel rival who wasn’t involved in the development process at all and whose chips will not be able to support it anytime soon. That said, AMD can only hope that Thunderbolt doesn’t catch on in a major way.

A lot more in the full entry courtesy of Xbit Labs.