As part of promtotion if the Thunderbolt technology, Intel is also showing off a small thumb drive which packs Thunderbolt technology to provide ultra-high data transfer speeds compared to the typical flash drives that plug into USB ports. The key-shaped prototype is small and includes a 128GB Sandisk flash drive inside, along with a Thunderbolt interface to connect directly into a PC's or Mac's Thunderbolt port.



Thunderbolt can transfer data at a speed of 10Gbps, while the currently used USB 3.0 interface offers about half that speed.

Earlier his week, Intel Thunderbolt 2, which doubles the speed of the protocol to 20Gbps. Thunderbolt 2 ports will be available in computers by the end of this year.

Thunderbolt supports the PCI-Express 2.0 data transfer and DisplayPort protocols.

Intel is also developing a low-power Thunderbolt technology for mobile devices.