IMO, not very interesting as the expensive/complex part of Thunderbolt is in the cables, anyway. It will certainly add some additional transistors to Intel cpus looking ahead, however, and Thunderbolt has had years to achieve widespread adoption and so far has gathered little interest--being custom-cable-dependent has a lot to do with it, imo. Probably looking at another Firewire story--although I suspect Firewire even though it failed ultimately garnered a far wider adoption than has Thunderbolt thus far--and for the same reason--the Tbolt cables, again.

next year Intel plans to make the Thunderbolt protocol specification available to the industry under a nonexclusive, royalty-free license.

That's excellent news. I really do like the idea behind TB, it's a shame Intel was never willing to let 3rd parties in on the game. Hopefully this will also mean that we will eventually see TB available on AMD systems.

IMO, not very interesting as the expensive/complex part of Thunderbolt is in the cables

The reason why the cables are expensive is because the technology hasn't become mainstream yet. It's like HDMI back in the day when it first came out and the cables cost a fortune. Once production reaches critical mass, then prices will come down. They could have driven up adoption of TB3 back in 2015, if they had built it into the 100 series chipset when they released Skylake, instead of relegating it into the separate (and expensive) Alpine Ridge controller. Motherboard manufacturers didn't want to drive up prices, or lower their margins, on their mainstream boards by including Alpine Ridge, so the feature was available only on some high-end motherboards (and MacBooks), and as such never reached the mainstream.

USB 3.1 gen2 in 2020 ?

as a fanboy. I hope intel never gets a proprietary lead on anything over what amd is currently doing. tired of intel ripping people off with there inflated prices. #nextfirewire

This article was a very interesting read. Chalk one up for Intel actually providing an actual beneficial advancement for no royalties. Appears to have the ability to utilize the existing USB 3.1 C port and cables. http://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/usb-3-1-vs-thunderbolt-3/

This article was a very interesting read. Chalk one up for Intel actually providing an actual beneficial advancement for no royalties. Appears to have the ability to utilize the existing USB 3.1 C port and cables. http://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/usb-3-1-vs-thunderbolt-3/

Exactly and why this will take off now that Intel is opening things up. Took them long enough sheesh. Prior this is like Beta vs VHS for those of you that are a bit more experienced in life but maybe this move will switch things up.

Beta!, I still have tons tapes with recording on using beta tapes, no player though. Not really sure what thunderbolt is though so i probably dont use it or care for this, but i might if intel uses it as reason to increase prices... with AMD doing as let they need to reduce prices not increase

Long overdue. Current 7th generation chipsets can't even produce full T3 bandwidth due to the DMI 3.0 bottleneck between the CPU and PCH. Even worse, PCIe SSDs have to share the same choke point. Meanwhile 16 pcie lanes are wasted on graphics cards, where 8 lanes are needed at most, and many people use the CPU graphics. This is the dirty little secret that Intel will address. Hopefully, we also get to see M.2 slots directly connected to the CPU soon too.

copper or fibre optics?