"One hundred" Thunderbolt devices to launch this year

Intel plans to have a hundred Thunderbolt devices on the market by the end of the year.

At Intel's developer conference in Beijing this week, PC Client VP Kirk Skaugen said the technology would also appear on some ultrabooks this year.

"We have dozens already in the marketplace, things like storage devices. But we're actually on track to deliver approximately a hundred different devices by the end of the year, and by the time we get into 2013, hundreds of different Thunderbolt devices," Skaugen said.

Thunderbolt allows the ability to plug multiple things into the one port. Its transfer speeds also outclass USB 3.0, making it ideal if you're shuffling HD video files around.

A Thunderbolt port was recently spotted on a PC motherboard, but the technology is far from mainstream outside of Apple products.

Skaugen pointed out the height of some laptops are now starting to be limited by the physical size of VGA connectors. Thunderbolt will in theory let designers squeeze the chasiss even more.

Which will all sound great on the brochure, but as we've pointed out, what's great in theory may not be cost effective in practice at the moment.

Skaugen also announced Intel will launch 3rd generation Intel Core processor in "just a few weeks". He went on to say that there are 21 Ultrabooks in existence with Intel 2nd generation Core chips, with more than 75 in development.