Thunderbolt is actually a few PCIe 3 lanes (4 in the original incarnation) and a display port in a cable. This way, an external peripheral is not inferior to mo

Thunderbolt is actually a few PCIe 3 lanes (4 in the original incarnation) and a display port in a cable. This way, an external peripheral is not inferior to most on board alternatives in terms of throughput, and has not room for interesting things add size is no longer a constraint. I am developing my first PCIe project and must say I am still shocked on how powerful and underutilized the bus is. Hope Thunderbolt solves this - peripherals could be much powerful than today, from SSDs and USB sticks to high bandwidth data acquisition tools.