Intel Alpine Ridge ThunderBolt can do 40 Gbps

A slide from an Intel presentation leaked today, and it is showing some interesting developments for thunderbolt. The WAAAAY too expensive connector keeps on progressing in performance though. The latest revision will be developed under code name Alpine Ridge and is capable of 40 Gbps links. So if you'd have an SSD fast enough in theory it could do a cool 5 Gigabyte per second transfer.

Alpine Ridge ThunderBolt will launch in 2015.  The Thunderbolt connector itself will undergo a change with the arrival of Alpine Ridge. It will be slimmer and shorter opposed to the current connector, at 3 mm. The connector can also pass 100W of power. There should be two models of Alpine Ridge, one with support for daisy-chaining, and one that supports just a single port.

The question remains though, will Thunderbolt ever kick off ? For that the prices of the ICs, connectors and hidiously expensive cables will need to drop with factor 5.