The development of the Thunderbolt interface to the current fourth generation has always been the focus of market. With the strong background and excellent transmission performance-- its father is Intel, the world ’s largest chip supplier, and its adoptive father is Apple, the world ’s largest consumer brand, Thunderbolt has excellent transmission performance. The original intention of the launch of the Thunderbolt interface is to allow to solve the problems of the wide variety of expansion device interfaces on the market and different functions, such as SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and video interface Displayport, HDMI, etc. With the integration of the lightning interface, high-bandwidth data and video and audio signals can be simultaneously transmitted. Thunderbolt technology was designed by Intel in 2009 and was named "Light Peak" ( the R & D code of Thunderbolt). Thunderbolt can be said to be the product of cooperation between Apple and Intel (Intel). It was developed by Intel and was introduced to the market through technical cooperation with Apple. This technology is mainly used to connect PCs and other devices.The technology is mainly used to connect PCs and other devices. It combines the first two mature technologies PCI Express data transmission technology and DisplayPort display technolog. These two channels can transmit data of these two protocols at the same time, and each one can provide bidirectional 10Gbps bandwidth. In order to save costs, Thunderbolt currently uses copper core connection instead of optical fiber link (the demo solution uses optical fiber Thunderbolt interface, which can even reach 100Gb / s). The theoretical maximum transmission rate of copper cable design can reach 50Gbps but it is only applied at 40Gbps now. The next update after the recent upgrade to the 4th generation should be the same transmission bandwidth of 80GGbps as DP2.0.

In the long course of development of the interface part, the speed of replacement is so fast. Compared with the chips of the product line of CPU, graphics card, motherboard, etc., the development of the interface is definitely slow. But every interface changes is a revolutionary change, and it also brings users enough technical changes. Of course, each emerging interface will also have corresponding advantages and disadvantages. Compared with its rich interface types on the market , it is common that the Thunderbolt interface has a very strong advantage and a very obvious disadvantage. Next, let's take a look at the shortcomings of the lightning interface. In this way, we also know why the Thunderbolt interface has not been popularized so far.