Intrigued by speculation that Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) $50 Thunderbolt cable is not a plain-Jane, copper-and-plastic affair, iFixit decided to take one apart to find out. After careful dissection, the team discovered a Gennum GN2033 and five other chips housed on each connector end of the cable, including "tons" of little resistors around the larger chips. According to Gennum's website, the GN2033 is a "tiny, low power transceiver chip designed to be placed inside the connectors at either end of a Thunderbolt cable." Essentially, the chips are used to facilitate the dual bidirectional 10Gbps links across the inexpensive copper medium.

Thunderbolt was first launched by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and Apple in February, and contains two separate 10Gbps links within a single pair of cables, one for display and the other for PCI Express devices. The renewed interest is mostly due to the shipping of the first Thunderbolt-compatible peripheral from Promise earlier this week--the 6-bay Pegasus R6 RAID storage device has a transfer speed touted to exceed a blistering 800Mbps. Perhaps even more appealing is how future iterations of Thunderbolt could offer the ability to scale up to 100Gbps when used with optical cables.

For more:
- check out this article at iFixit Blog
- check out this article at Wired
- check out this article at AppleInsider

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