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Your Guide to New Thunderbolt Products Shown at NAB 2016 in Las Vegas

NAB 2016 was a great show to demonstrate the possibilities with Thunderbolt technology and how it can serve serious professionals and avid prosumers working with 4K and virtual reality content.  

Thunderbolt 3 was a bit hit at NAB 2016 with a large number of vendors demonstrating how their Thunderbolt 3 solutions can help users access, store, and display 4K content. Key new features of Thunderbolt 3 include 40 Gb/s connection speeds, dual 4K@60Hz display support, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (10 Gb/s) support, advanced dual direction charging capability using the reversible USB Type-C connector, and support for external graphics processing and 10GbE/40GbE networking.

Open Drives is a great example of what can be done with Thunderbolt, allowing professional users to quickly access and store large amounts of 4K content. Open Drives solutions take advantage of the 10GbE networks that Thunderbolt computers can join by using 10GbE adapters like the AKiTiO Thunder2 10G Network Adapter and Sonnet Twin 10G.  With Thunderbolt 3, you can get even faster 40GbE networks by using new Thunderbolt 3 adapters like the ATTO ThunderLink NQ 3401 (QSFP+).

Thunderbolt is also about bridging all sorts of high speed interfaces over a single connector.  

Goodway showed off new Thunderbolt 3 products for consumers like a Thunderbolt 3 to 2 Adapter, Thunderbolt 3 to Dual HDMI 1.4 Adapter, Thunderbolt 3 to Dual DP 1.2 Adapter, and Thunderbolt 3 dock.

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For professional interface standards, companies like AJA displayed Thunderbolt products like the T-TAP, Io XT, and Io 4K to help users connect Thunderbolt computers to various video and audio I/O for content capturing and editing.

Those needing to do serious editing work on a PC workstation could see the Thunderbolt 3 based Dell Precision 17 7000 Series (7710) mobile workstation.  Dell has one of the most complete lineups of Thunderbolt 3 enabled PC's like the Dell XPS 13 9350 Laptop, and various Latitude, Precision, Alienware models.

Thunderbolt 3 is not all about work.  Razer showed how Thunderbolt 3 can enable gaming notebooks with desktop PC graphics performance.

Click on the links below to see other companies showing their Thunderbolt based storage and I/O products at NAB 2016.

Atech Flash Technology

Accusys

​AKiTiO

Blackmagic

CalDigit

HGST G-Technology

HighPoint

JMR

​OWC

QNAP

Sonnet

Raidon Technology

Seagate LaCie

Other than Thunderbolt 3, the other new interface standard promoted at NAB 2016 was 12G-SDI which supports uncompressed 4K@60Hz video workflows in a professional broadcast media environment.  Growth of 12G-SDI will only further increase demand for Thunderbolt 3 as more 4K@60Hz content needs to be captured, piped, stored, and edited. 

With companies now pushing 8K at NAB 2016, users can look forward to Thunderbolt continuing to evolve and meet future challenges of the industry.  For now, though, there is plenty of 4K content for Thunderbolt 3 to handle.