If you have been waiting patiently for the super-fast Thunderbolt port technology to be made available on Windows PCs, the wait may soon be over. ExtremeTech reports that Thunderbolt ports could be launching on April 23rd as part of Intel"s planned launch of the Ivy Bridge series of CPUs.
While Ivy Bridge won"t have native support for Thunderbolt, Intel is reportedly trying to get Ivy Bridge-based motherboard makers to add an additional controller for Thunderbolt ports. So far some of the world"s biggest PC makers such as HP and Dell have yet to say if they will have Thunderbolt ports in their PCs. It appears that USB 3.0 has wider support among PC makers at this point.
Thunderbolt was first announced back in February 2011 and allows for data transfers at speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. The port was first made available on Apple"s MacBook Pro notebooks and has since been used on other Apple PCs.
News.com reports that this week, PC storage company LaCie plans to demo two Windows Thunderbolt versions of its products, the Little Big Disk SSD and the 2big Thunderbolt external hard drives, at the NAB trade show in Las Vegas. That could be a big hint that the launch of Thunderbolt for Windows is right around the corner.