s0niqu3

DJenkins, on 23 October 2012 - 01:33 PM, said:

Hi,

I think you've got that backwards, looking at that site, those all take thunderbolt input, and convert them to some other output (fiber channel, SAS/SATA, or GBE connections) and not the other way round, so they don't actually provide thunderbolt output..

Hi,

I've been doing a lot of research on thunderbolt lately, and basically , thunderbolt is an external pci-express interconnect. And it's not really a matter of speed, if your specific motherboard and CPU combination could theoretically activate an additional x4 slot (the current dual-port thunderbolt motherboards use 4 pcie lanes from the PCH/NorthBridge directly connected to the controller), you'd have enough bandwidth.

The real problem though, and the reason you're unlikely to ever see a pcie thunderbolt card is that the specification from intel requires that thunderbolt can carry a display signal, and do so without using a jumper cable connected to a discrete GPU. Both Asus and ASRock were originally planning on releasing a thunderbolt "add-in" card for a wide range of their newest z77 motherboards, but as they required an external jumper cable to carry the graphics signal from a discrete GPU to the thunderbolt controller, intel denied them thunderbolt certification.

This is also the most likely reason why apple hasn't added thunderbolt to the Mac Pro, since they lack integrated/onboard graphics.