News - AMD attempts to trump Thunder with Lightning

[HEXUS]

Demonstrates Lightning Bolt interface at CES.

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[kingpotnoodle]

Oh AMD, you so quaint, all those lovely ideas, shame that they are so late to market they feel like a trip to the museum.

[Ross1]

I want the inventive, envelope pushing, intel beating AMD back. These desperate copycat attempts are kinda sad to see.

[Scribe]

I don't know, I've always felt that Thunderbolt was a bit of a pain in the ass as it came before it's time, with USB 3.0 fairly new it felt as if it was intruding into a market that didn't need it and USB 3.0 hubs for Thunderbolt are really only just rearing their heads and quite costly. Personally I'd rather AMD been quicker on the uptake, all hail USB 3.0 and then something like Thunderbolt come out 5 years later, with a much improved spec.

[FRISH]

Well thunderbolt was intended to support usb connections, but they were denied that.

[Biscuit]

why on earth is the market dividing like this? I want universal standards so i can use everything with everything. Convergence not bloody divergence

[miniyazz]

I can't really see this as anything but a step back. There's a faster connection out there that does more stuff.. why develop a slower connector, that's less future-proof? It makes no sense!

[watercooled]

No license fees/royalties to pay and no exposure to the system bus like you get with Thunderbolt...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I can't really see this as anything but a step back. There's a faster connection out there that does more stuff.. why develop a slower connector, that's less future-proof? It makes no sense!

Thunderbolt licensing costs are actually quite high for motherboard companies and also it is a closed Intel only standard too,ie, it is only limited to Intel motherboards ATM. It is not like USB,ethernet and other standards which everyone else can adopt.

Thunderbolt is a great piece of technology but I don't want proprietary vendor specific standards like it to become popular - all the standards we take for granted like DVI,HDMI,USB and ethernet can be used by anyone irrespective if they use X86 CPUs or ARM ones. You should be blaiming Intel for this one - not AMD. Intel is trying to use this technology to put other competitors including ARM based ones at a disadvantage - it helps no one. Since they have a larger market share they can push for the adoption of this technology and if they don't license it(or if they do what they did to Nvidia) they can try to denigrate other more easily licensed or open standards.

This is the sort of rubbish we saw in the 1980s and 1990s with many companies and TBH,I thought we were past these sort of things.

Since AFAIK,Intel has not licensed the technology,AMD has to have an alternative for their systems as a tick-box feature.

AMD is probably only developing Lightning Bolt(why did they call it this?) as a much cheaper alternative and tick-box feature,ie,have something that can do a reasonable amount of the functionality of the more expensive Thunderbolt, but is cheap so they can bung it on all their motherboards. After all AMD virtually did that with both SATA3.0 and USB3.0 too.

I do hope it is a standard that others can adopt freely,if not then its a waste of time IMHO.