So I guess the official branding of Lightpeak is Thunderbolt, even from Intel? And the standard connector (even outside of Apple products) is essentially Mini-Displayport?
I wonder if Apple will eventually replace the dock connector on the iPhone/iPad with Thunderbolt? That would be a compelling reason to upgrade: your music sync time would be freed of another bottleneck.
Of course, it kind of messes with the third-party accessory market, but I'm sure they'd love another reason to get people to buy new stuff.
Also remember that the doc connector is a revenue source. I'm having trouble finding a source right now, but if I am remembering right Apple sells the actual dock connectors to accessory makers.
You can't just get them from JAE, you have to license the male plug thru Apple and it's a big process. And Apple lets no one but Apple use the female 30 pin plug.
I don't know, but there is a reason no other manufacturers use it. And its a massive legal and due diligence process to get into the Made for iPod program which gives you all the specs and supplies the connectors, along with charging royalties.
Yep, Apple charges royalty on the 30 pin conector, which varies in cost depending on what it's used for. You have to be enrolled in Apple's MiFi program too. Apple makes money everywhere.
I'm no hardware engineer, but I'd imagine a new iPad would integrate a Thunderbolt controller in a similar manner to how the older iPods integrated a FireWire controller.
The dock connector is actually wide enough to allow the device to dock! So don't expect it to go away while docking is a priority for Apple's design decisions.
Ever try to buy a car mount for an iPhone? :) Mine came with about 10 different plastic snap-on mounting brackets. Apple could give a crap about the third party accessory market.
The big issue with replacing any iOS connectors with desktop standard connectors is power. Thunderbolt specifies 10W of power; USB specifies 2.5W; the Camera Connection Kit only supplies 0.5W. I doubt that Apple is going to ship anything that provides much more power than that.
This goes beyond my knowledge of hardware design, but I suspect there's no fundamental reason preventing it. The signal processing at those sort of clock rates may however consume more power than is practical - I don't know.
PCIe essentially trades greater hardware complexity for lower power requirements (and higher performance). Original PCI is similar in this regard (that also reduced number of required external passive components on motherboards compared to ISA).
So if anything prevents usage of PCIe in embedded devices it's added complexity, not power requirements. By the way electrical interface of most modern true-color TFT panels is identical on the lowest layer to PCIe (and SATA and who knows what else).
I'm pretty sure the dock connector isn't going anywhere anytime soon, though I could see a Dock-to-Thunderbolt cable optionally replacing the Dock-to-USB cable.
Since there's only one port, you'll most likely need a splitter to use both the data and video simultaneously, unless you want your existing monitor to be at the end of the daisy chain. (DP was brought to market for terminal devices, not pass-through like Firewire, any Thunderbolt devices will most certainly have two ports.)
I assume most monitors will transition from DP to a Thunderbolt pass-through quickly, but in a daisy-chain situation, the monitor would be disconnected the least, meaning it would need to either be the first in line, or split off, allowing the other peripherals to be removed without re-connecting the monitor.
This is a bit of a moot point, as far as Apple is concerned.
"[...] It is completely backward compatible with DisplayPort v1.1a and requires no new cables or other equipment [...]" - Bill Lempesis, VESA Executive Director.
A 1.2 device will work as a 1.1a device.
The features that you'll loose out on:
* Driving displays in excess of 2560 x 1600 x 30 bpp @ 60 Hz (Apple LED Cinema Display tops out at 2560 x 1440 currently).
* Multiple display daisy chaining (LED Cinema Displays only have a single Mini DisplayPort jack and as such cannot be daisy chained).
* AUX channel data transport at 720 Mbps (beaten by the PCIe transport layer rates within Thunderbolt, which when driving a LED Cinema Display at full resolution leave about ~2Gbps available for data).
* 3d stereoscopic display support (Aww, no Avatar 3D).
* Additional audio format support (mostly related to Blu-ray, which Macs still don't do).
It's sad, yes - but there's not much incentive for Apple (not sure about Intel) to support 1.2 currently. And since Apple is going to have exclusive use of the Thunderbolt interface until it starts showing up on other PCs in 2012, Intel only really has to meet Apple's requirements while they finish up the rest of the spec (optical cabling, etc).
Maybe they'll find time to add in 1.2 support by then.
Wasn't the original idea of light peak to be optical? Why didn't they deliver on that promise, I want my future back, it's frickin 2011 now and we still don't use optical connectors to connect our devices :)
(I guess they'll have a hard time with the 'Thunderbolt' icon when they go to optical, it makes even less sense for optical than for a low-voltage connector)
The pictures I've seen look like mDP to me. Apple invented Mini DisplayPort, so mDP is proprietary, but it's licensed for free and VESA later adopted it as part of the DisplayPort standard.
I was surprised about the symbol as well. It's just a matter of time until someone gets hurt while trying to connect their peripherals to a transformer.
my sister recently plugged a usb cable into an ethernet port. don't assume that because something seems like a massive amount of kludgery to you that a user won't do it anyway.
I plugged a USB cable into an Ethernet port many times! Not intentionally, obviously, but I did it because the USB plug has just the right width to fit snugly in an Ethernet port. It’s easy to do when you are not looking. You should try it, it even feels sort of right in a very wrong way.
There is no kludgery involved when plugging USB cables into Ethernet ports. They just fit perfectly.
I once plugged an Ethernet cable into a USB port...I was a lot younger, and I took a file to it because I was absolutely convinced I'd been shipped a cable that was too big.
I once plugged an Ethernet cable into a USB port...I was a lot younger, and I took a file to it because I was absolutely convinced I'd been shipped a cable that was too big.
If you've ever done field tech work, freelance or otherwise, you'd know that mere physical incompatibility isn't going to stop some people from plugging nearly any connector into nearly any port.
IMO, nearly all of the icons on the side of the laptop don't make sense. The headphones are clearly recognizable, and the rest are just pretty shapes. I'd argue that the headphone jack is the only place you actually need the icon, since it shares the same shape as the goatse-plug next to it (whatever that's supposed to be).
This was the first thing I thought. This is pure and simple bad UI design. UIs should move away from ambiguity, especially around concepts of safety. The high voltage symbol is a safety symbol.
Sure, this very second, there's going to be no confusion between the two symbols, but if this catches on and the symbol becomes ubiquitous, it will muddy the discrimination of the safety logo.
This is simply irresponsible behaviour from a tech giant who intends for this symbol to become ubiquitous. All in the name of "oo, it looks cool!". Bad Apple!
Thunderbolt technology leverages the native PCI Express and
DisplayPort device drivers available in many operating systems today. This native software support means no extra software development is required to use a Thunderbolt technology enabled product.
Not enough. That's talking about support from developers, not whether hardware vendors need to pay for licensing to include this tech in their hardware.
That said, Mini DisplayPort is free of hardware licensing fees... so there's a good chance.
The poster of the question is a developer. I answered to help get the information he asked for, not have my answer graded on completeness or lack thereof with a curt "Not enough".
I think the "Not enough" was aimed at Intel, not you. But you seemed to have missed the point of the question.
No hardware developer in the consumer space charges developers to access their hardware. Spec owners frequently do charge other companies to implement their specs, though.
Intel has a mixed record on this - some specs - like USB - they have led but have been implementable licence free.
Other things they consider their propriety interfaces and have sued over - see the recent lawsuits between Intel & Nvidia over their memory bus.
So it is very reasonable to wonder if Nvidia and AMD are going to be able to implement this freely, or are they going to have to pay a tax to Intel. As far as I can see your answer doesn't address that question at all.
Yeah, sorry for the confusion. As nl says in the sister-post, that was Intel has released "not enough" info for us to know the full scope of licensing terms.
Has anybody read anything explaining how giving external devices DMA access is or isn't a problem? It seems one could make a Thunderbolt device that silently injects itself into the running system, writes itself to the hard drive, etc. without even touching the CPU.
Seriously. As a non-Mac user, I really can't see going out of my way to use anything other than USB at this point, especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed.
> especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed.
For some uses it's not just a matter of speed - USB2 and FW are similar in terms of speed but USB2 is pretty much unusable for multi-channel audio recording purposes.
And so is FW unless you buy one of the very expensive interfaces that happens to have highly optimized fine tuned drivers.
Source: personal experience finding the drivers of most FW audio interfaces under $1000 impose outrageous CPU loads when doing many channels and using more than one device on the supposedly daisy chainable FW bus.
Funny, my experience is the opposite--FireWire drivers are generally very DMA oriented and require little to no CPU at all, while USB drivers tend to need more CPU for the protocol overhead. This is because FireWire is an address oriented bus and the hardware can map FireWire addresses to CPU addresses and DMA in and out with (literally) zero CPU overhead. A driver write would really have to go out of their way to make a FireWire protocol become CPU bound. I suppose the audio protocol is isochronous based which would be slightly different, but that is still DMA based in every FW implementation I know of.
8 channels of 24 bit/192KHz audio is only 2MB/s which is basically nothing. I'm very surprised that you would see any issues.
I have about 3 or 4 devices in my FW chain (including disks and scanners) and my sub $1000 FW audio interface works just fine.
That's interesting. I've had no problems with USB MIDI adapters. As long as I have less than 5ms latency in my audio path, I'm able to play comfortably over the cheapest USB-MIDI adapter on Amazon. I've also had reasonable success with USB audio interfaces, with latency around 5ms (IIRC - I switched back to my ancient emu10k1 card because of the DSP).
Same here. I have a $250 FireWire audio interface that imposes basically no load on the system even with upwards of 10 channels in use.
I chose FireWire over USB because of all the complaints I saw in the Amazon reviews for every USB audio interface I looked at; many of the FireWire audio interfaces had absolutely glowing reviews.
I've had similarly excellent experiences with disks connected via FireWire.
1) USB3 has a 1 year lead - check out how many products are out already
2) 5Gbps vs 10Gbps. There are just a couple of SSDs that need SATA III (6Gbps) because the 3Gbps isn't enough. You just don't need the speed for disk I/O. What for then? Current DisplayPorts 1.2 has 17Gbps so I don't really see the Thunderbolt replacing it.
also Firewire 800 was substantially faster in theoretical and particularly in practical throughput
I recall it being because Apple screwed up the licensing so bad ($1 per port) that everyone got together to create and then push USB 2.0 as a replacement even after the royalties got reduced to something semi-reasonable like 25c per device.
I worked at a place that developed FireWire peripherals. I can tell you the $1/port price never mattered to us, despite the loud backlash on the internet.
The real reason USB "won" is because Intel really pushed it and integrated it into every one of their chipsets. Possibly even licensing it to the other PC chipset makers for cheap/free up front.
Given that Intel is backing Thunderbolt, it stands a good chance at achieving the same widespread usage.
USB can easily be emulated and done using just the CPU, no chips required while Firewire required a real chip that did the negotiation and sat directly on the memory bus for DMA.
It sounds like Thunderbolt is "compatible" with USB and Firewire in the same way ExpressCard and CardBus are -- by putting the host controller that would normally be on a PCI/PCIe card on the bus.
I disagree. He's just saying that the speed difference doesn't currently matter, not that it never will. The battle for adoption is fought based on today's usefulness, not tomorrow's (in most cases).
Re #2: higher performance external video cards (think 3D accelerator dongles for laptops), cluster interconnects, RAID arrays of SSDs, RAM-based "disks" for use as another layer of cache, lower-latency ultra-high-channel-count external sound cards, etc.
Thunderbolt aims to replace nearly every kind of single-use connectors (HDMI, DisplayPort, eSATA, USB, Ethernet). Unifying the connector for displays, peripherals, network and power is a great idea, so I can't complain if they're going up against USB 3.0.
Ha. Good luck to them. Thunderbolt will be lucky to replace firewire. There's no way in the world it can replace USB, Ethernet or HDMI. Just think of the number of devices out there with these ports.
It might replace SATA eventually, but it will have to fight against USB.
From the Apple page on Thunderbolt: "you can use existing USB and FireWire peripherals — even connect to Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks — using simple adapters."
So, twice as fast as USB 3.0 and compatible with existing devices. Doesn't seem like much of a fight. USB won't disappear overnight, but it's already obsolete.
Thunderbolt may be technically superior in every single way, but unless other manufacturers use it for their laptops/motherboards, Apple's 10ish% market share is going to ensure that USB 3.0 "wins" ultimately. This will wind up being just like firewire where aside from Apple's stuff and a select few "Apple" manufacturers, nobody uses it and consumers either buy the more expensive Apple stuff, or use a dongle and see 0 benefit from the superior tech.
Apple also pioneered USB with the iMac. Because USB was the only way to connect anything to the iMac, it served as a catalyst for device makers to come out with USB devices, since they knew they had a captive market.
Once the number of USB peripherals reached critical mass, the general PC market followed suit.
So, will Thunderbolt adoption more closely resemble that of Firewire, or USB?
I believe the new macs still have USB ports, no? So what incentive do peripherals manufacturers have to use Thunderbolt and target just the new macbooks vs USB 3.0 and targeting everything?
Apple seems to be targetting a whole different sector with this technology. See Cringley's take on this (http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/attack-of-the-minis/) about how this technology could go into data centers. Interesting move by Apple.
Oh, that's just Crazy Bob talking. If that had really been Apple's strategy, they wouldn't have alienated so many customers in the way they killed the xServe line last year. If they had really wanted to keep their toe-hold in that market, they wouldn't have said, "Let them eat mini Macs." I think it's simply the case that Apple's signature advantages in the consumer space don't translate into a 1U world, and they recognized that.
I’m happily using my FireWire 800 port on my 2007 MacBook Pro. I don’t really have a problem with the competition.
(What’s nice for Apple is that this port isn’t exactly risky for them. If it doesn’t succeed their Macs have a glorified Mini DisplayPort with a lighting bolt symbol next to it. It might cost a bit more for them to add but that’s about it. It seems to me that only Intel has a problem if this fails.)
Wonder how many monitors this can push. Also, what will happen to Apples 30pin connector on their iPods,iPhones... I guess we will know Tuesday. Are there any external hard drives with thunderbolt yet?
The bandwidth is apparently entirely unimpressive. DisplayPort is currently at 17.28 Gbps, so Thunderbolt can push ... 0.6 monitors? ;) (In the worst case, at least)
I have been excited about Light Peak/Thunderbolt for a year or so now, but in that time it seems the ambitions have become smaller, and the competition has developed as well.
Well possibly, if it's in displayport mode using all four lanes in one direction, it can push that much bandwidth. How much bandwidth does a 27" apple display use?
2560 x 1440 resolution at 24 bits per pixel = 88,473,600 bits
At 60Hz, that's 5,308,416,000 bits per second. So a little more than half the claimed 10Gbit bandwidth of Thunderbolt. I guess you're not going to be running two of them on the same port.
That's not really relevant as long as you can't choose the directions for the channels. You are only going to get one channel in each direction.
Edit: Whoa. I just re-read parts of the Intel documentation, and it seems there are indeed two independent downstream channels. My bad. It also looks like there is no provision for using both channels for a single device? I have no idea.
Check out the Wikipedia page for DisplayPort, as it has a good explanation of the bandwidth requirements for video.
It lists 2560x1600x30bpp @ 60Hz as using just over 8Gbps, so any one consumer monitor will work fine over Thunderbolt.
The 17.28Gbps speed would only be needed for multiple monitors or a high-resolution, high-color-depth, high-refresh or 3D monitor. Thunderbolt and full-speed DisplayPort both have enough aggregate bandwidth for four 1080p streams.
All Macs except the low end plastic MacBook and the MacBook Air have a FireWire 800 port. So, no. (Also: Why would they dump FireWire without a replacement in place or even just the lab?)
This will probably replace FireWire sooner or later.
If you're serious enough about your gaming hardware that you're currently building gaming PCs every couple of years, you're still going to be replacing your CPU and your graphics card every couple of years, whether graphics are inside the case or not.
I can't seem to find an answer to this in the materials - is this optical or copper? Light Peak was supposed to be optical, but the Wikipedia page has unsubstantiated claims of it initially being copper.
Same reason why every interface standard that flirts with optical eventually ends up supporting copper: optical components are more expensive, and over short runs you can get acceptable performance with copper.
It's copper for now. I haven't found any confirmation of this, but I believe Intel's strategy for optical is to have the lasers and light detectors built into the cable itself, so that the plug connection is still completely electrical.
Can a Thunderbolt device (eg display) expose USB to peripherals? With my current setup, I connect my display via USB and DVI to my MBP in order to connect USB peripherals via the display. I'd love to break that redundant USB connection with Thunderbolt.
Yes. It looks like you would have to implement USB on top of PCIe in the monitor, though.
> Intel's Thunderbolt controllers interconnect a PC and other devices, transmitting and receiving packetized traffic for both PCIe and DisplayPort protocols. Thunderbolt technology works on data streams in both directions, at the same time, so users get the benefit of full bandwidth in both directions, over a single cable.
Five years ago I would have been eagerly anticipating this, but I can't really get excited anymore. USB3 has probably already won, and while I love the idea of monitors and other devices all using the same port, I don't think it will be enough to drive adoption.
Why do you say that? Are there more USB 3 things on the market than I'm aware of? With Intel and Apple behind it, I wouldn't say Thunderbolt is a sure thing, but it seems promising.
Is this peer-2-peer like FireWire was or it is a client-server model like USB? I see people talking about this being copper or fibre. If this is fibre, then it can't supply power to the device like USB? I don't see that catching on for most portable devices (e.g. hard drives). It's extremely convenient to just have one cable for a device that needs connectivity and power when it comes to portable devices.
Something I really wanted is, when I connect my laptop to my home computer, my laptop can use the home computer's CPU, GPU and RAM and have an additional screen.
I believe Thunderbolt will make this dream true, since the Intel page mentioned "workstation performance expansion".
Hopefully the same as when you plug a Mac into another Mac via FireWire. (One of the Macs becomes the most expensive external HDD ever. This requires one Mac to reboot into the target disk mode. It would be nice if the same trick would be possible with Thunderbolt without rebooting.)
Because serial is a trivial interface to implement in home brew electronics, just throw in a MAX232.
Even many major consumer electronics are still developed via a serial console. Sure they have fancier connectors to talk to your PC and the network but serial is so simple it's practically idiot proof. So it breaks far less often, makes new hardware much simpler to bring up, and it allows you to debug the fancier interfaces without interfering with their operations.
The weird thing is that there already is an external cable for PCIe. An 8-lane PCIe cable can beat Thunderbolt, at 16Gb/s instead of 10. (Although I'm not sure if that's bidirectional; if not, you'd have to go to a 16-lane cable.)
Yes, this is what they say about every new standard. And once you have thrown out all your working peripherals and bought all new ones, then LightningBlast is released, not compatible with Thunderbolt. This has been going on as long as I have been alive.
I know, I know: Thunderbolt is the last time people will have to throw out all their things and start over. This time really will be the last time because it is a new standard to rule over all, just like NuBus was.
And it's definitely not going to be dead on arrival like PCI-X, or not supported by drivers on the Mac for most peripherals like PCI-e. No, Thunderbolt is going to be truly universal and forever lasting world without end. If only you believe, amen.
Having just bought my third DVI adapter for my MBP, I am underwhelmed that Apple is building an external i/o bus around this connector. They wear out very quickly.
Having just bought my third DVI adapter for my MBP, I am underwhelmed that Apple is building an external i/o bus around this connector. They wear out very quickly.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadOf course, it kind of messes with the third-party accessory market, but I'm sure they'd love another reason to get people to buy new stuff.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi
The big issue with replacing any iOS connectors with desktop standard connectors is power. Thunderbolt specifies 10W of power; USB specifies 2.5W; the Camera Connection Kit only supplies 0.5W. I doubt that Apple is going to ship anything that provides much more power than that.
So if anything prevents usage of PCIe in embedded devices it's added complexity, not power requirements. By the way electrical interface of most modern true-color TFT panels is identical on the lowest layer to PCIe (and SATA and who knows what else).
I assume most monitors will transition from DP to a Thunderbolt pass-through quickly, but in a daisy-chain situation, the monitor would be disconnected the least, meaning it would need to either be the first in line, or split off, allowing the other peripherals to be removed without re-connecting the monitor.
"[...] It is completely backward compatible with DisplayPort v1.1a and requires no new cables or other equipment [...]" - Bill Lempesis, VESA Executive Director.
A 1.2 device will work as a 1.1a device.
The features that you'll loose out on:
* Driving displays in excess of 2560 x 1600 x 30 bpp @ 60 Hz (Apple LED Cinema Display tops out at 2560 x 1440 currently).
* Multiple display daisy chaining (LED Cinema Displays only have a single Mini DisplayPort jack and as such cannot be daisy chained).
* AUX channel data transport at 720 Mbps (beaten by the PCIe transport layer rates within Thunderbolt, which when driving a LED Cinema Display at full resolution leave about ~2Gbps available for data).
* 3d stereoscopic display support (Aww, no Avatar 3D).
* Additional audio format support (mostly related to Blu-ray, which Macs still don't do).
It's sad, yes - but there's not much incentive for Apple (not sure about Intel) to support 1.2 currently. And since Apple is going to have exclusive use of the Thunderbolt interface until it starts showing up on other PCs in 2012, Intel only really has to meet Apple's requirements while they finish up the rest of the spec (optical cabling, etc).
Maybe they'll find time to add in 1.2 support by then.
(I guess they'll have a hard time with the 'Thunderbolt' icon when they go to optical, it makes even less sense for optical than for a low-voltage connector)
Once the technology is widely used, the name doesn't matter anymore I guess.
Intel's page on Light Peak (not the same as theirs on Thunderbolt): http://techresearch.intel.com/ProjectDetails.aspx?Id=143
Wikipedia has a very informative article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_DisplayPort
There is no kludgery involved when plugging USB cables into Ethernet ports. They just fit perfectly.
Sure, this very second, there's going to be no confusion between the two symbols, but if this catches on and the symbol becomes ubiquitous, it will muddy the discrimination of the safety logo.
This is simply irresponsible behaviour from a tech giant who intends for this symbol to become ubiquitous. All in the name of "oo, it looks cool!". Bad Apple!
Is it royalty-free?
If the answer is negative, what are the licensing terms?
http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/325136-001US_...
That said, Mini DisplayPort is free of hardware licensing fees... so there's a good chance.
No hardware developer in the consumer space charges developers to access their hardware. Spec owners frequently do charge other companies to implement their specs, though.
Intel has a mixed record on this - some specs - like USB - they have led but have been implementable licence free.
Other things they consider their propriety interfaces and have sued over - see the recent lawsuits between Intel & Nvidia over their memory bus.
So it is very reasonable to wonder if Nvidia and AMD are going to be able to implement this freely, or are they going to have to pay a tax to Intel. As far as I can see your answer doesn't address that question at all.
For some uses it's not just a matter of speed - USB2 and FW are similar in terms of speed but USB2 is pretty much unusable for multi-channel audio recording purposes.
Source: personal experience finding the drivers of most FW audio interfaces under $1000 impose outrageous CPU loads when doing many channels and using more than one device on the supposedly daisy chainable FW bus.
8 channels of 24 bit/192KHz audio is only 2MB/s which is basically nothing. I'm very surprised that you would see any issues.
I have about 3 or 4 devices in my FW chain (including disks and scanners) and my sub $1000 FW audio interface works just fine.
I still use a USB 2.0 MIDI controller and the latency is absolutely killer. Press a key, a beat later, see the note appear on piano roll...
I chose FireWire over USB because of all the complaints I saw in the Amazon reviews for every USB audio interface I looked at; many of the FireWire audio interfaces had absolutely glowing reviews.
I've had similarly excellent experiences with disks connected via FireWire.
1) USB3 has a 1 year lead - check out how many products are out already
2) 5Gbps vs 10Gbps. There are just a couple of SSDs that need SATA III (6Gbps) because the 3Gbps isn't enough. You just don't need the speed for disk I/O. What for then? Current DisplayPorts 1.2 has 17Gbps so I don't really see the Thunderbolt replacing it.
also Firewire 800 was substantially faster in theoretical and particularly in practical throughput
The real reason USB "won" is because Intel really pushed it and integrated it into every one of their chipsets. Possibly even licensing it to the other PC chipset makers for cheap/free up front.
Given that Intel is backing Thunderbolt, it stands a good chance at achieving the same widespread usage.
I don't have anything that plugs into thunderbolt.
I couldn't and wouldn't buy a computer without USB. I can live without Thunderbolt.
Does anyone know if Thunderbolt is similar to FireWire in this way?
It might replace SATA eventually, but it will have to fight against USB.
So, twice as fast as USB 3.0 and compatible with existing devices. Doesn't seem like much of a fight. USB won't disappear overnight, but it's already obsolete.
Once the number of USB peripherals reached critical mass, the general PC market followed suit.
So, will Thunderbolt adoption more closely resemble that of Firewire, or USB?
(What’s nice for Apple is that this port isn’t exactly risky for them. If it doesn’t succeed their Macs have a glorified Mini DisplayPort with a lighting bolt symbol next to it. It might cost a bit more for them to add but that’s about it. It seems to me that only Intel has a problem if this fails.)
I have been excited about Light Peak/Thunderbolt for a year or so now, but in that time it seems the ambitions have become smaller, and the competition has developed as well.
2560 x 1440 resolution at 24 bits per pixel = 88,473,600 bits
At 60Hz, that's 5,308,416,000 bits per second. So a little more than half the claimed 10Gbit bandwidth of Thunderbolt. I guess you're not going to be running two of them on the same port.
If I was editing movies it'd be a different story.
Edit: Whoa. I just re-read parts of the Intel documentation, and it seems there are indeed two independent downstream channels. My bad. It also looks like there is no provision for using both channels for a single device? I have no idea.
It lists 2560x1600x30bpp @ 60Hz as using just over 8Gbps, so any one consumer monitor will work fine over Thunderbolt.
The 17.28Gbps speed would only be needed for multiple monitors or a high-resolution, high-color-depth, high-refresh or 3D monitor. Thunderbolt and full-speed DisplayPort both have enough aggregate bandwidth for four 1080p streams.
This will probably replace FireWire sooner or later.
Besides, Thunderbolt = 10 G_b_ps, PCIe x 16 = 8 G_B_ps. No idea on latency/transfers per second, though. (http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express)
http://gemsres.com/story/apr08/536976/ENGELBART_2.jpg
From http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
I don't know what that means though. Does the newly released MBP support both or only one?
(Not that I hate copper or anything, it is just that they designed it for fiber from the beginning and then suddenly bailed out)
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/intel-thunderbolt-a-close...
> Intel's Thunderbolt controllers interconnect a PC and other devices, transmitting and receiving packetized traffic for both PCIe and DisplayPort protocols. Thunderbolt technology works on data streams in both directions, at the same time, so users get the benefit of full bandwidth in both directions, over a single cable.
http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
Isn't that basically UHCI?
Why do you say that? Are there more USB 3 things on the market than I'm aware of? With Intel and Apple behind it, I wouldn't say Thunderbolt is a sure thing, but it seems promising.
Snarky I know but I just couldn't help myself.
I believe Thunderbolt will make this dream true, since the Intel page mentioned "workstation performance expansion".
TDM is supported in Thunderbolt, to my great glee. Terrific Firewire feature.
No need to replace your peripherals.
This is feasible and would be a good future, just like the future we live in now where USB has replaced serial ports, parallel ports and PS/2.
Even many major consumer electronics are still developed via a serial console. Sure they have fancier connectors to talk to your PC and the network but serial is so simple it's practically idiot proof. So it breaks far less often, makes new hardware much simpler to bring up, and it allows you to debug the fancier interfaces without interfering with their operations.
Still not crazy about it as yet one more connector for mass-manufactured devices, though.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PCI_Express#P...
I know, I know: Thunderbolt is the last time people will have to throw out all their things and start over. This time really will be the last time because it is a new standard to rule over all, just like NuBus was.
And it's definitely not going to be dead on arrival like PCI-X, or not supported by drivers on the Mac for most peripherals like PCI-e. No, Thunderbolt is going to be truly universal and forever lasting world without end. If only you believe, amen.