Sony Notebooks to Offer Thunderbolt Support via USB Port

At the beginning of the year it has been rumored that both Sony and Dell are interested in introducing Intel's Thunderbolt technology into their products and a recent report comes to claim that the first Sony Vaio model to include this interface, the Ultimate Mobile PC, will implement the standard via a proprietary USB port.

Sony has a long history of coming up with its own proprietary standards, so its decision to go with a USB port instead of a mini DisplayPort connector wouldn't come as such a great surprise to anyone.

Outside of connecting high-speed peripherals, the Thunderbolt port on the Ultimate Mobile PC can also be used to linking the notebook to a docking station.

This holds a USB 3.0 port, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, a Blu-ray burner as well as an AMD Radeon HD 6700M series graphics card.

The rest of the laptop's specifications are not known at this time and Sony hasn't come forward with any information regarding release date or pricing.

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 device to include this interface is Apple's 2011 Mac BookPro laptop. (via engadget)