Sorry if it’s a stupid question, but I remember reading some articles that thunderbolt is now a royalty free tech that others can implement.
Others connected the dots, especially that AMD Igpus are a thing in high performance NUCs, that AMD may take advantage of this in the future and try to implement such a feature on their motherboard chipsets so I was wondering what chance we have of something like this happening.
At the moment it seems low. From what @wendell mentioned briefly in some videos we currently have a hard time getting any information when or if that will be the case.
Then again there are some boards that appear to have headers for it already (specifically some Gigabyte boards, for example the X399 Designare). But there seems to be no documentation about it, i.e. they’re inactive. If they can be enabled in the future noone knows. I would not be surprised if it’s in the Chipsets already and just disabled for legal reasons until the time comes.
AFAIK Thunderbolt is an Intel IP and what reason would Intel have to share?
Licensing fees?
To actually enable propagation of it as a standard? You won’t be able to sell it and get royalties for it if no one builds peripherals for it because it doesn’t take off.
it isn’t purely intel anyway, Apple was also involved.
If you want to see what happens to standards when you keep them to yourself, go look up IBM’s attempt on the PS/2 systems with MCA.
Or Lightning connector from Apple? 
Lightning isn’t intended to try and sell a peripheral market and at the time (remember: 2011) USB C didn’t exist.
I have the board you mentioned and yes the header is there and also physicly connected (traces leading to other parts of the board, checked with multimeter :)) but yeah, inactive and should be made usable via BIOS update afaik, but till now it isn’t even mentioned anywhere and even @wendell can’t get an answer out of Gigabyte when a BIOS update will follow that activates it.
Yes you’re right, forgot about that tidbit 
Even if Gigabyte did Wendell probably wouldn’t be allowed to say anything.
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Oh no. I have news. Video soon.
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Fun fact. Tb3 is royalty free as of 3/31/18
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I am expecting some bios updates on 1/1/19
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Now I’m excited, wanna see （¯﹃¯）
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Micro Channel Architecture was possibly the worst installment of Ma Bell type monopolistic business practices and to this day IBM aka Big Blue denies their on demise in the Small and Horne office Computer business was due to their American Telephone and Telegraph (Randell Stevenson) type business, moral,ethical and economic down fall which eventually lead to them stooping to the idiotically low level of Selling their whole Small/Home office devision off to Lenovo and the subsequent demise of the once highly respected and beloved Think Pad and Think Center Lines.
The reason i hate Randell Stevenson so much is that I am a Verizon Wireless customer and as long as Carlos Slim (TelCel) The Mexican/Central and Soth american telecommunications behemoth made when Stevenson and slim partnered up and basically strong armed every one From Verizon and Sprint/Nextel out of the aforementioned cellular communications market I lost compleete respect for both Big Blue and AT&T/TelCel.
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This is probably the smartest thing Intel has done in years. I can’t wait for tb3 to be the standard.
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