AMD certainly would benefit from minimizing Thunderbolt. If Thunderbolt were to catch on, AMD would likely have to purchase components from chief rival, Intel. AMD says that they support USB 3.0 and that Thunderbolt’s speed would be superfluous.
“Existing standards offer remarkable connectivity and together far exceed the 10Gb/s peak bandwidth of Thunderbolt. These solutions meet and exceed the bandwidth utilization of many peripherals,” a spokesperson for AMD said.
AMD believes that consumers would rather stick to USB and not deal with daisy chaining devices with monitors. They also claim that Mini Display ports already offer great speeds. “The DisplayPort1.2 standard offers up to 17Gb/s of peak bandwidth for displays. […] Many AMD-based platforms support USB 3.0 which offers 4.8Gb/s of peak bandwidth, AMD natively supports SATA 6Gb/s with our 8-series chipsets. [Meanwhile], the total bandwidth stated for a Thunderbolt channel is only 20% higher than one PCI Express 3.0 lane and about 52% higher than a single USB 3.0 port,” claimed the official for AMD.
It seems AMD is a bit worried, especially when they claim Thunderbolt is only “52% faster than USB 3.0.”
Does AMD have to worry, or will Thunderbolt be a dud?