Apparently AMD isn’t very pleased with Intel’s announcement of the new blistering fast I/O connection called Thunderbolt. Well, they are rivals anyway, so logically anything that Intel announces would usually brush the bruise of AMD, no matter what it is.

An unnamed AMD representative reportedly said that Intel’s new Thunderbolt tech will become another proprietary standard that may not be widely adopted, giving reason that the current overall lack of devices that can take advantage of the extreme throughput. The spokesperson even claims that this new tech might not bring any tangible improvements to the industry, as it does not “substantially” outperform current generation I/O technologies and can even offer lower bandwidth in some cases.

“Existing standards offer remarkable connectivity and together far exceed the 10 Gb/s peak bandwidth of Thunderbolt,” the AMD spokesman told X-Bit. “These solutions meet and exceed the bandwidth utilization of many peripherals.”

The DisplayPort1.2 standard offers up to 17Gbps of peak bandwidth for displays. The total bandwidth for a Thunderbolt channel is only 20-percent higher than one PCI Express 3.0 lane and about 52-percent higher than a single USB 3.0 port. “AMD-based platforms support USB 3.0 which offers 4.8Gbps of peak bandwidth, AMD natively supports SATA 6Gbps with our 8-series chipsets,” the AMD official claimed.

“Consumers generally benefit by having standard, high-speed ports available on their mobile devices,” the spokesperson said. “Proprietary ports or the requirement of a dongle to employ those industry-standard ports may be an obstacle to consumers having the full computing experience at home or on the road.”

Someone should tell AMD (or this spokesperson) to focus more on their delayed Bulldozer instead of trash talking, and remind him that Thunderbolt is 10Gbps, which is almost twice faster than USB3.0. If anything, SSDs will actually be able to utilize 10Gbps of bandwidth once manufacturers like Western Digital and Seagate release drives with the Thunderbolt interconnector.

SOURCE via X-Bit Labs