By Jason Ziller, Director of Thunderbolt Marketing, Intel Corporation

In June at Computex 2015, Intel unveiled Thunderbolt™ 3 – The USB-C that does it all. Since then, we’ve seen a lot of excitement in the press and industry about Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 brings Thunderbolt™ to USB-C at speeds up to 40 Gbps, creating one compact port that does it all – delivering the fastest#, most versatile connection to any dock, display, or data device##. For the first time, one computer port connects to Thunderbolt™ devices, every display, and billions of USB devices. A Thunderbolt 3 cable provides four times the data transfer per second and twice the video bandwidth of any other cable, while also supplying power. It’s unrivaled for new uses, such as 4K video, single-cable docks with charging, external graphics, and built-in 10 GbE networking.

Image 1: The four capability vectors for Thunderbolt 3

Today Intel proudly announced the USB 3.1 certification of the Intel® Thunderbolt™ 3 controller and is among the first to pass this level of acceptability set forth by the USB-IF industry group’s compliance program. Thunderbolt 3 controllers provide two ports that include USB 3.1 support with dedicated bandwidth of 10 Gbps each, instead of shared, providing more bandwidth than other USB controllers#.

In recent news, Intel announced the new Intel® Xeon processors and Lenovo* announced their new family of mobile workstations, the ThinkPad P50 and P70, based on Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1500M v5 product family and features two Thunderbolt 3 ports for ultra-fast connectivity and a 4K UHD display or optional FHD touch.

Image 2: Lenovo ThinkPad P70 with its two Thunderbolt 3 ports

At IDF15, taking place in San Francisco August 18-20, several Thunderbolt demos will be on display in the Thunderbolt Community, booth numbers 931-942, with a dozen of our partners. A Thunderbolt 3 single-cable docking demo will also be highlighted in this area. And don’t miss the Thunderbolt 3 external graphics demo in the Computing Innovation Zone. This is the first event where Thunderbolt 3 demos will be showcased publicly! For those interested in storage, by utilizing Thunderbolt 3 in tandem with the Intel® SSD 750 Series, we’ve created an external storage enclosure capable of running the 750 SSD at full performance – come check it out at booth number 570. Not to mention, there will be Thunderbolt 3 Tech Chats on Tuesday, August 18 from 1-3 p.m. and again on Wednesday, August 19 from 1-3 p.m., if you’d like to learn more. Lastly, there will be a Thunderbolt 3 session on Thursday, August 20th in room 2006 from 10:45 – 11:45 a.m. Please check out all that Thunderbolt has to offer at IDF this year!

* As compared to other PC I/O connection technologies including eSATA, USB, and IEEE 1394 Firewire. Performance will vary depending on the specific hardware and software used. Must use a Thunderbolt-enabled device.

## Thunderbolt 3 provides DisplayPort*, which can natively connect to all displays with DisplayPort and mini-DisplayPort*, and via adapters can connect to all other modem display interfaces, including HDMI, DVI, and VGA. .

Tests document performance of components on a particular test, in specific systems. Differences in hardware, software, or configuration will affect actual performance. Consult other sources of information to evaluate performance as you consider your purchase. For more complete information about performance and benchmark results, visit http://www.intel.com/performance.