Thunderbolt - CompTIA A+ 220-1101 – 1.6

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Let’s have a look at Thunderbolt.

What is Thunderbolt?
Thunderbolt is a technology created by Intel that is used to connect external devices. Effectively it is similar to USB but the underlying technology is different. Over time, technology has converged to some extent, but I'll delve into that later in the video.

Thunderbolt, was developed by Intel to run on Intel CPUs and uses PCI Express and DisplayPort for device connectivity. While it shares USB's hot-plugging capability, Thunderbolt uses different protocols to USB. Essentially, Thunderbolt facilitates a connection to a computer's PCI Express bus, ensuring high-speed performance.

Thunderbolt, when it was originally released, was designed to provide faster communication to external devices than USB. It cost more, but if you needed the extra speed, it was a good option. Thus, it was generally used for external devices like high-speed storage devices, for example, RAID storage devices. This allowed users who were doing highly demanding activities such as video editing to connect an external storage device. Before Thunderbolt was released, portable external storage did not have a fast enough interface to be used effectively for disk intensive operations like video editing.

Thunderbolt allows an external device to use PCI Express as if it was connected directly to the motherboard. There are external graphics cards that use the Thunderbolt interface. They work just like an internal video card that connects via PCI Express, however, can be externally plugged into any computer that has a Thunderbolt connection. Therefore, devices like laptops that generally are difficult or not possible to upgrade, this is an option if you need to upgrade the video card. It is also an option if you want to move high-speed devices from computer to computer.

Thunderbolt supports DisplayPort and thus you can plug a monitor directly into a Thunderbolt port. USB video is only possible by the USB video adapter being essentially a mini video card. Natively, USB does not support video.

Thunderbolt, in contrast, provides DisplayPort directly from the computer. Thus, the computer requires a video card in order to transmit DisplayPort directly over the Thunderbolt cable to the monitor. Later in the video we will see a better example of this concept.

Thunderbolt differs from USB in that USB transmits only one protocol. Thunderbolt transmits two protocols, these being PCI Express and DisplayPort. It achieves this by dividing the data into packets and sending them down the cable. Thus, Thunderbolt devices need to be able to split the signal into PCI Express and DisplayPort signals when it arrives at the other end. The device may also pass this signal onto other devices. This is often called daisy-chaining. For example, two monitors can be combined. In order to use this feature, the device needs to have an input Thunderbolt port and an output Thunderbolt port.

Those are the basic features of Thunderbolt, now let’s have a look at how it has changed over time.

Thunderbolt Versions
There are currently four different versions of Thunderbolt. The main one that you most likely will come across is version 3. Version 3 runs at 40 Gigabits per second. Before USB 4, this was significantly faster than USB. Thus, if you wanted very high-speed external devices, Thunderbolt was your only choice.

Thunderbolt was popular on Apple products but did not appear that much on non-Apple products. Thunderbolt devices tend to cost more than other devices on the market, which may explain why it did not get much market adoption. If you have an old Thunderbolt device, it is backward compatible with previous versions.

Versions 3 and 4 use a Type-C connection, while versions 1 and 2 of Thunderbolt uses the Mini DisplayPort connector. There are adapters available which change between Type-C and Mini DisplayPort. To use an older Thunderbolt device with a computer equipped with the newer Thunderbolt 3 Type-C port, you will need to use an adapter.

References
“The Official CompTIA A+ Core Study Guide (Exam 220-1101)” pages 23 to 24

Credits