Acer, Lenovo and ASUS Decide to Give Thunderbolt to Ultrabooks

Yet again a rumor has sprouted about the newly-created ultrabook market, this time involving Acer, ASUS and Lenovo.

Ultrabook market seems to be very keen on putting on a good show for those customers that are open to the idea of buying ultrabooks.

They are so keen, in fact, that they will even outfit their super-thin laptops, or some of them, with the Thunderbolt connectivity technology.

Thunderbolt is a connectivity standard that Intel created and which uses two major protocols for transmissions.

One of them is the PCI Express interface, for moving data, while the other is DisplayPort, for images/video.

According to Digitimes, there are at least three notebook makers that have decided to integrate Thunderbolt into the ultrabooks.

The trio is Acer, ASUS and Lenovo. They will be competing against each other as soon as the next batch of machines is out.

For those unaware, the ultrabooks are going to use Intel's Ivy Bridge central processing units.

Only a select number will actually have Thunderbolt, though, and the reason is very straightforward: expenses.

Simply put, Thunderbolt will add an extra $20 (15.50 Euro) to the price of any ultrabook. Given how PC makers are striving to make these laptops cheaper instead of more expensive, this means that only high-end models will go forward with it.

It should also be noted that the Ivy Bridge platform has native support for USB 3.0, which is very fast on its own and is basically a common feature of systems and mobile devices already.

Granted, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 won't have actually replaced USB 2.0 until 2013, but it is a very convenient alternative to the Thunderbolt that has yet to actually score many design wins.

Acer expects ultrabooks to account for 25-35% of its 2012 laptop sales. Its rivals probably aim for similar things, possibly hoping to see the newcomers grow and sell as quickly as netbooks did before tablets came along.