Microsoft Will Officially Support Thunderbolt In Windows 10

[Neil H]

Microsoft Will Officially Support Thunderbolt In Windows 10

[Brandonx1]

Finally. Been using thunderbolt HD native for years.

[Neil H]

Its been a long silent time, although everything personally I've tested HD Native and two types of Expansion chassis over Thunderbolt on Window 7, 8.1 and 10 which all worked just fine, Operating system full suppport is what many manufacturers such as Universal Audio were refusing to support Windows until Microsoft came forward so at least the wheels are in motion and with full support people can buy products with confidence of support from the manufacturer if they need technical help.

[Sardi]

About time! Hopefully this leads to greater adoption of the protocol and more products across the board for both Windows and Mac.

[Wall2Wall]

I'd jump to PC, on my next rig and laptop. Apple's continuous moving target of an O/S is not a train I want to continue on.

Microsoft dude, Psychlist1972, online:

Thunderbolt drivers are just PCIe drivers plus hotplug / balancing support.

To support Thunderbolt today, yes, it's as simple as writing a driver. We've updated our driver author docs to include the small changes required for a PCIe driver to work with Windows 10 and Thunderbolt.

What causes problems is that the older TB implementations are hit and miss in the hardware. Peripheral companies do not like having to support those configurations, and even some motherboard manufacturers have said their TB2 add-on cards are for graphics only.

In the November Windows 10 release, we added all the engineering required to support hot plug and rebalancing for audio devices, plus security. We simply haven't yet announced our official support matrix for TB -- which is likely to center around USB-C/TB3. We're doing some testing currently before we announce anything official. But the capability is there.

At CES, a number of companies announced Windows 10 PCs with Intel Skylake + Alpine Ridge + USB-C Thunderbolt 3 support. There are laptops for sale today with this configuration, as well as motherboards from Gigabyte, ASUS, and others with this. My latest PC build at home uses an ASUS motherboard with on-board Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt/USB-C.

And just for overall clarification for folks here: I don't blame companies for not supporting Thunderbolt on Windows in the past. It was entirely possible (and some companies did), but there was a support burden due to the types of hardware interfaces and drivers the OEMs were creating.

That said, some have made it work just fine.

With a standardization around USB-C/TB3/Skylake/Alpine Ridge, we hope to greatly reduce the IHV burden. With the number of new PCs launched with TB3 support (primarily gamer-focused machines to externalize high end GPUs), we hope to see the market grow significantly this year as well. The main things we'll need to see are TB3/USB-C devices, and/or official adapters that convert from TB3/USB-C to the older connector. Presumably Apple will move to USB-C in future hardware (I have no info there) as well, which will help drive the direction.

And, as I've said before, I'm more than happy to work with anyone who is implementing (or wants to implement) a TB device for Windows.

[The Weed]

Neil, any insight/news/idea if/when AVB (Audio/Video Bridge) will be supported by Windows?

Thanks,

[YYR123]

One mountain at a time weed !!! One mountain at a time

[Bob Olhsson]

As it stands MS intends to include RedNet natively but it's audio only. There are a LOT of television broadcasters who will need AVB for all manner of things on PCs so there should be no shortage of drivers. I can see how Avid would want to hold off until the dust settles since this involves Media Composer too.

[The Weed]

The reason I asked was a radio cluster I do work at purchased an Avid S3L and then found, way down in the fine print, that, to use AVB, it was Mac only. They're a Windows shop. I found it strange, because AFAIK, the engine in the S3L is a cut down version of Windows.

Cheers,

[Kris75]

I hope this means that we will also see dedicated Windows drivers for TB Soundcards.