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New Thunderbolt chips, dubbed Cactus Ridge, coming in 2012

Thunderbolt is certainly taking its sweet time catching on, but Intel isn't about to give up yet. In 2012 the company will be rolling out Cactus Ridge, a replacement for it's current Light Ridge and Eagle Ridge solutions. There will be two versions: a quad Thunderbolt channel, dual DisplayPort model (replacing the similarly speced Light Ridge); and a dual T-bolt, single DisplayPort edition (taking over for Eagle Ridge). Exactly when they'll land next year or how much it'll cost OEMs to shoehorn the controllers into their machines is still a mystery, but we're holding out hope that this time next year the 10Gbps jacks will be in every Dell, Acer and Apple.

[Image credit: iFixit]