Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane?

No, it's Thunderbolt!

Today Intel officially announced that its Light Peak technology would be branded as Thunderbolt on all platforms (not just Apple making up fancy names). We didn't feel that there was anything wrong with Light Peak; we had grown quite fond of using that name. But for the casual consumer, Thunderbolt likely sounds more like something cool out of a comic book.

Thunderbolt features two bi-directional channels with transfer speeds up to 10Gbps each, and delivers PCI Express directly to external high performance peripherals such as RAID arrays, and can support FireWire and USB consumer devices and Gigabit Ethernet networks via adapters.

Rumor has it that Nikon's next generation of DSLRs will have a Thunderbolt connection. Good. I've been waiting for this USB-killer to arrive in the market. Let's see how quickly it goes mainstream.