If you are a PC user and have been waiting patiently for the super-fast Thunderbolt port to be installed on new PC systems, your wait may be over soon. Digitimes reports via unnamed sources that Thunderbolt's owner and developer Intel will finally have the port ready to be placed on PC desktops and notebooks starting in April 2012.
The story claims that Sony will have Thunderbolt ports in its PC products along with Asus. In addition, the motherboard maker Gigabyte is expected to release motherboards with Thunderbolt support as well.
Thunderbolt was first announced back in February and allows for data transfers at speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. The port was first made available on Apple's MacBook Pro notebooks and has since been used on other Apple PCs. Intel has said that the Thunderbolt technology would appear on Windows-based PCs at some point but has never said specifically when that day would come.
The Thunderbolt port will likely compete for PC space with USB 3.0, the latest version of the Universal Serial Bus port technology that is just beginning to find a way into new PCs. While USB 3.0 has data transfer speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second it is also backwards compatible with all of the older USB 2.0 devices that have been released. Microsoft also announced that its upcoming Windows 8 operating system will natively support USB 3.0.
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