HP Thinks About Using Thunderbolt for Display Connectivity

This year's Intel Developer Forum has hosted quite a few devices that make use of the high-speed Thunderbolt interconnect to perform various tasks and now HP just admitted the company is evaluating this technology for utilizing it as a display connectivity solution.

This information was released by Jeff Wood, vice president of Global Marketing at HP Commercial Solutions, in a meeting with the Bright Side of News website.

According to HP's representative, the company is not only looking to include this technology in their monitors, but it is also taking into consideration the option of putting the Thunderbolt connector on a discrete graphics card.

Until now, neither AMD or Nvidia have made such a solution available in the retail market, but the former has already developed an external Thunderbolt GPU for Sony which used it in the VAIO Z notebook.

Furthermore, just the other week, Nvidia admitted they are also interested in developing an external graphics card built using the 28nm fabrication process, which will most probably make use of the Thunderbolt interconnect.

The Thunderbolt technology was developed in order to provide a unified interface with enough bandwidth to replace all the current connection buses, such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire or PCI Express.

Although this first iteration of Thunderbolt is still far away from reaching that goal, it still manages to join together the PCI Express and the DisplayPort interfaces and can provide, in theory, 20Gbps of upstream and 20Gbps of downstream bandwidth (via two 10Gbps bidirectional channels).

Thunderbolt can also daisy chain up to 7 devices and deliver a maximum of 10W of power without requiring any additional connectors.

Since Thunderbolt was introduced, quite a few companies have announced their support for the technology, but, as we speak, the only computing systems to include this interface are built by Apple and Sony.