AMD Says Thunderbolt Doomed to Fail

An unknown AMD representative has commented on Intel's Thunderbolt technology, saying that it will just be another proprietary standard that never attains good adoption. One obvious reason is that there are currently very few products that can actually take advantage of the new interface. Whilst Thunderbolt promises speeds up to 10Gb/s, modern copper thunderbolt wires cannot come close to this theoretical throughput, meaning other technologies such as SATA 6Gb/s encroach upon the performance levels of Thunderbolt.

Right now multiple array of drives and some are the only thing that can begin to take advantage of Thunderbolt, and since there is a major lack of devices using the standard, AMD says its rival's propietary standard will fail. By limiting the throughput of the DisplayPort to 10Gb/s (down from its max of 17Gb/s), this also creates problems for arrays of external displays.