ThunderBolt Immentation in the New IB Macs

[thelostswede]

I never said anything about socket 2011 and that's an entirely different discussion, but there were some initial problems with the platform and Intel cut a few corners to get it out in the end, such as lack of SAS 6Gbps, so now all the boards have 3Gbps SAS instead... :

There is ways around the Thunderbolt problem, such as LucidLogix's Virtu MVP software in Windows, but it's a bit buggy still and I don't know if Apple would be willing to go down a similar route. Even so, it wouldn't be following Intel's implementation of Thunderbolt and it would be one hell of a hack from Apple's side to get that working without any kind of integrated graphics. Admittedly it's not impossible, but not very plausible.

What Apple could do, is have a custom made graphics card done for them with the Thunderbolt chip on the graphics card, that would pretty much solve the issue, but maybe it's not quite as simple as that, since you'd lose a fair bit of PCI Express bandwidth. However, PCI Express 3.0 might solve that, as it has far more bandwidth available than any graphics card can take advantage of today. Throw in a PCI Express bridge chip and you technically have a workaround.

 

[parkingmo]

In the new MBA, there is those ships. (and it's also inside Mountain Lion...)

Seem to be a Intel DSL3510L Thunderbolt Controller.

Wifi: Broadcom BCM 943224 module looks just like the Mid 2011 MacBook Air's wireless board.

 

[thelostswede]

The DSL3510L is the dual port Cactus Ridge chip, the same used by Gigabyte and ASRock as I mentioned earlier.