You’ve probably been in this situation before: you need to quickly transfer some very large files from one PC to another. The easy way is to hook them up to the same network, but if all you have is some cruddy old Wi-Fi, or if the network is secured, then that’s not an option. You can use an external drive or disk, but that’s both slow and requires you to hang around for at least half the operation. Why can’t you just run a wire between the systems and copy it over directly?
It all sounds pretty convenient, but it’s better than that, because you actually don’t have to connect the two systems directly. Thunderbolt Share can also be supported by Thunderbolt accessories. That means that you can instead connect the two systems to the same Thunderbolt dock, or even use a monitor with multiple Thunderbolt ports on it. Of course, transfer rates will be limited to the slowest speed in the chain, but you’re still looking at around 20 Gbps as a minimum.
Even still, this definitely seems like it could be convenient for anyone who needs to move lots of files around very quickly. As one use case, we could make use of Thunderbolt Share here in the labs to quickly transfer benchmarks to new machines. Intel says that Thunderbolt Share will start showing up on “select PCs and accessories” this year.