Plugable today announced their new Thunderbolt 3 Docking Station and Dual-Display Adapter line - Plugable's most powerful products yet. Thunderbolt 3 seems to be sweeping the PC industry in 2016 - it costs less than Thunderbolt 2, doubles performance to 40Gb/s, integrates a USB 3.1 Gen2 (10Gb/s) controller, supports power delivery up to 100W, and brings both Thunderbolt and USB to the new reversible USB-C connector.

"Thunderbolt 3 on the USB-C connector is a game-changer," said Bernie Thompson, Plugable Technologies Founder. "Thunderbolt 3 is a well-standardized set of advanced features with required certification so computers, peripheral devices, and cables will just work."

Intel's tick-tock product development cycle is disturbed. The cadence of launching a new CPU microarchitecture on a given silicon fab process, miniaturizing it to a smaller fab process, and then launching an even newer micro-architecture on that process; is about to change with the company's 7th generation Core "Kaby Lake" processor. When launched, it would be the third microarchitecture built on the company's 14 nm process, besides "Skylake" (current new architecture) and "Broadwell" (miniaturization of "Haswell" to 14 nm.) Some of the very first documents related to Kaby Lake began to move about, making news along the way. The architecture is scheduled to launch along with its companion 200-series chipset some time in 2016.

To begin with, Core "Kaby Lake" will continue to be built on the LGA1151 package, and will likely be backwards compatible with existing 100-series chipset motherboards with a firmware update. From what we get to understand from leaked material, it will not be a vastly newer architecture than Skylake, at least not of the kind Skylake was to Broadwell. There are still CPU performance enhancements on offer, an "enhanced full-range BClk overclocking," which could mean improved overclocking on chips with upwards-locked multipliers (although we won't get our hopes too high and call it a return of the BClk overclocking era). A bulk of the R&D will fall into improving the integrated graphics, to support multiple 5K displays, 10-bit HVEC and VP9 hardware-acceleration; platform-integrated Thunderbolt 3, and platform interface support for Intel Optane (3D XPoint memory).

GIGABYTE announced that it's enabling 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 support on select boards that have 20 Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 support, with a mere firmware update. It turns out that the Thunderbolt controllers on the company's Z170X-Gaming G1, Z170X-Gaming GT, and Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboards physically support Thunderbolt 3, but due to a lack of certification, its support was withheld, and bandwidth limited to 20 Gb/s.

What's more, these boards support the Thunderbolt protocol over USB 3.1 type-C, at lowered bandwidth, besides its traditional Thunderbolt/mini-DisplayPort connector at rated bandwidth. This should help with the new generation of Thunderbolt daisy-chaining docks that support USB type-C connections. To get the latest firmware, all you need to do is update your board's BIOS to the latest one on GIGABYTE's website.

Eurocom has launched the Sky X9 super high performance, fully upgradeable gaming laptop with desktop NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics, Desktop Skylake Intel Core i7 6700K CPU and 64 GB of DDR4 memory. "We have put a desktop graphics card into a laptop, giving our customers amazing desktop 980 performance in a laptop. Users now have 980 desktop graphics performance combined with Intel Skylake desktop CPU performance." Mark Bialic, Eurocom President.

EUROCOM Sky X9 is powered by desktop NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics, a fully unlocked GM204 core with 2048 CUDA cores. 8 GB memory with 7 Gbps memory clock and GDDR5 memory interface is supported. The EUROCOM Sky X9 is the first laptop with upgradeable desktop graphics supported inside, another amazing innovation from Eurocom. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is overclockable for maximum control and performance.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, is proud to be the first to bring Thunderbolt 3 to the desktop PC by launching the GIGABYTE Z170X-UD5 TH motherboard with support for the 6th Generation Intel Core processors.

Powered by Intel's own Thunderbolt controller the new Thunderbolt 3 protocol, which is available over two USB Type-C connectors on the back I/O of the GIGABYTE Z170X-UD5 TH, brings an unprecedented single-wire bandwidth of up to 40 Gb/s -- twice more than the previous generation of Thunderbolt! This incredible increase in bandwidth is also accompanied with support for different protocols such as DisplayPort 1.2 and USB 3.1, which is backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, opening up a world of new possibilities.