HP has built Thunderbolt 2.0 support into its desktop and mobile Workstation portfolio, as the firm looks to boost adoption of the high-speed data transfer technology.
Despite being 4x faster than the USB 3.0, uptake of Thunderbolt connectors has been limited up to now and closely associated with Apple's Mac and MacBook Pro ranges.
The refreshed HP Z240, Z620 and Z820 Workstations will now ship with Thunderbolt 2.0 support along with the ZBook 15 and ZBook 17 laptops. HP hopes being the first PC vendor to extensively support Thunderbolt will attract enterprises users who need to transfer large volumes of data.
Ron Rogers, VP of product development at HP, explained why the vendor has chosen to implement Thunderbolt across its Workstation product line.
"There are three reasons. First is just raw performance. You can take a 4K camera, convert [content] and play the video in real-time at the same time [using Thunderbolt]," he said, during a customer panel.
"The second thing is that with that performance, you're seeing peripheral vendors responding with large arrays of drives - 10TB is becoming common all the way up to 20TB. With that storage you can use [peripherals] in large data environments like the oil/gas and film [industries].
"The final thing is the workflow advantage Thunderbolt is able to move large volumes of data easily... In reality we don't want to be taking 4TB files and sending them through the internet so it's a problem that Thunderbolt will solve.
As well as Thunderbolt, HP's desktop Z Workstations will also include support for Nvidia's high-end 3D Quadro graphics cards. HP will ship the devices with 1866MHz RAM as well, which it claims offers a performance increase of 16 per cent over previous generations.
