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Intel making Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free for manufacturers in 2018 [u]

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Thunderbolt has never seen a great deal of market penetration, but that may be about to change with Intel natively integrating Thunderbolt 3 into future CPU models and making the protocol royalty-free to chipmakers in 2018.

"We think the first thing is going to drive broader adoption and deployment of Thunderbolt 3 in PCs," said Intel's lead for Thunderbolt development Jason Ziller in an interview with Wired . "The second will drive also broader adoption in the ecosystem, with a lot of different peripherals and other devices."

Ziller noted that cost of peripherals, with six-foot, active, full-speed cables topping $60, has been a problem for adoption. The moves by Intel for wider adoption should drive down costs both from a reduction in licensing costs needed to build the devices in the first place, as well as from a mass-production "economy of scale" standpoint.

"Cost is always a consideration, I think the integration into future CPUs will help reduce the overall solution cost on the computer," said Ziller. "And, we're continually working with the industry to lower the cost of the cables and the devices."

"There always have been and probably will continue to be some wired ports on even the thinnest and lightest computers," added Ziller. "So having a single port that really do everything that you need is our vision for Thunderbolt 3."

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The modern Thunderbolt connector was developed by a consortium of companies, including Apple and Intel, as "Light Peak." Thunderbolt is in many ways is more like Apple and Texas Instruments' legacy FireWire connector than USB.

Apple is on-board with the decision to make the protocol royalty free.

"Apple and Intel have collaborated on Thunderbolt from the beginning," said Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio in a statement. "As the industry leader in its adoption, we applaud Intel's efforts to integrate Thunderbolt technology into its CPUs and open it up to the rest of the industry."

The latest incarnation, Thunderbolt 3 was included on Apple hardware for the first time on the 2016 MacBook Pro, and uses the USB-C physical connector and has two discrete speeds. Using "active" cables, or cables with transceiver chips embedded in them for negotiation, peak speeds can reach 40 gigabits per second when supplied with sufficient PCI-E channels. Thunderbolt 3 can also use "passive" cables without transceivers, cutting the downstream speed to one channel at 10 gigabits per second.

Thunderbolt 3 was originally supposed to have been integrated with the Kaby Lake processor family, but plans changed somewhere along the way. It is not yet clear which processor revision Intel will include support for Thunderbolt 3.

33 Comments

macxpress 17 Years · 5948 comments

Kudos to Intel for doing this. Hopefully, this will make Thunderbolt a more widely adopted technology. 

4 Likes · 0 Dislikes
rob53 14 Years · 3345 comments

What's the cost breakdown on Thunderbolt products? I'm talking about both drive enclosures and cables, the latter seems to be a major rip-off unless licensing costs are huge.
How much (more) does the actual hardware cost?
How much does licensing cost?
How much is pure profit for whoever makes and sells the product? 

USB-3 (not USB-C) is cheap. Why is that? Is the hardware cost very low? Any licensing costs?

As far as Intel including it on the CPU chip, that only helps Intel sell CPUs. Does it really reduce the cost to peripheral vendors?

1 Like · 0 Dislikes
tenthousandthings 18 Years · 1060 comments

So does this mean it will be royalty-free for AMD to make Thunderbolt 3 controllers for their CPUs?

2 Likes · 0 Dislikes
bdkennedy1002 13 Years · 540 comments

Firewire 400, Firewire 800, Thunderbolt 1, Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 3. It's time to stop with the failure proprietary connectors.

1 Like · 0 Dislikes
Mike Wuerthele 9 Years · 6965 comments

bdkennedy said:
Firewire 400, Firewire 800, Thunderbolt 1, Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 3. It's time to stop with the failure proprietary connectors.

TB3 uses USB-C. The connector isn't proprietary. You may be thinking about the protocol.


Besides, "royalty-free" is about as non-proprietary as you can get.

8 Likes · 0 Dislikes