Thunderbolt 3 technology

[wpshooter]

I noticed that this morning there was a Linux Mint update for Thunderbolt 3.

Can anyone tell me if desktop motherboard makers (and in particular Dell)
have motherboards (which can be purchased as a separate item towards
building a system) which are Thunderbolt 3 capable ?

Thanks.

[rbmorse]

Some, but not all, high-end ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards for Intel CPUs.

[wpshooter]

Does Thunderbolt only help in increasing speed of data storage type transfers or
does it also help increase speed in other aspect of computer operations, i.e.
launching, loading and running applications, boot speed, etc., etc. ?

Thanks.

[leo-tech]

I know Thunderbolt is a relatively new technology, but still some PC notebooks with Thunderbolt 1 (10Gbps) first appeared maybe 3-4 years back, and now Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps) appears in many computers - I wonder if anyone can share experience of booting Mint from external Thunderbolt drive, comments and suggestions? (I guess the speed of external Thunderbolt 3 box with m.2 NVMe inside is comparable with internal m.2 NVMe SSD speed)

Does Thunderbolt only help in increasing speed of data storage type transfers or does it also help increase speed in other aspect of computer operations, i.e. launching, loading and running applications, boot speed, etc., etc?

"speed of data storage transfers" and "launching, loading and running applications, boot speed etc" are closely related, of course the latter will depend on the former