Motherboards Thunderbolt

[fata1_666]

Thunderbolt

just seen on apple website this will be awesome when arrives in pc motherboards hopefully by end of year!

The fastest, most versatile I/O ever in a notebook.
Imagine accessing multiple streams of uncompressed HD video — from your notebook — at speeds that let you edit an HD feature film in real time. That’s how Thunderbolt technology will connect the next generation of high-performance peripherals to the next generation of computers — starting with MacBook Pro. Ultra-fast and ultra-flexible, the Thunderbolt pipeline is more than 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and it offers unprecedented expansion capabilities. It changes what you can do on a notebook.

The Thunderbolt port will give you plug-and-play performance with a whole new world of Thunderbolt peripherals, as well as with the Apple LED Cinema Display and other Mini DisplayPort peripherals. You can daisy-chain up to six devices, including your display. And with support for video and eight-channel audio, it’s easy to connect HDMI-compatible devices — like your TV and home stereo — using the HDMI adapter you already have. Current VGA, DVI and DisplayPort adapters are also supported.

So wheres the review on this new tech by bit-tech.net? please can we see a review soon

[legoman]

This will bet he new FireWire in my opinion. Something for the over priced fruit lovers who come out with things like "i want the new iPhone black in white!!! Why wont they make it??? i shall now cry into my decaff superskinny mocha frappachino with extra frothy llama cream".

Find me a common place activity that that will require the use of anything greater than a USB3 or SATA 3.0 connection.

Gigabit Ethernet beats it anyway with 100Gbits per second. So technically Xerox beats Apple

[Tangster]

I care not.

[GoodBytes]

Silly. It's a like a PCI-E 1x port with Display Port embedded on it. Due to Display port, it complicated things as if you have your own GPU.. how does it send a signal there? If anything, it should be a GPU thing... but that means it need more PCI-E bandwidth. Soooo don't get your holes up. Moreover, it makes devices that support thunderbolt expensive as both need expensive controllers to work.

Daisy chain displays, USB pass through, audio support, conversion to DVI and HDMi with a simple inexpensive adapter, is all Display Port 1.2 features (2009 standard). Nothing new here.


Also, Daisy Chain is 6 monitors maximum BUT at lower resolution. You can put 4 display at 1920 x 1200 Read more on Display Port: http://www.displayport.org/consumer/?q=content/faq

All Intel did is made thunderbolt merged with Display Port (as Display Port allows it... heck you put put anything with it... Ethernet, firewire, you name it), hence why the plug is identical. So it's not much any innovation here. It's like power eSATA port.. it's really an eSATA port merged with a USB port. You can fit USB devices in their and normal eSATA plug in there, and they work fine (I have 1 on my laptop, and 2 on my motherboard). I use eSATA as it's same speed as the internal SATA port for my external HDD. And eSATA is identical to SATA, but the plug is different to hold better.

[IvanIvanovich]

hmm... if i remember correctly there was something about this, back when intel was calling it lightpeak.

[GoodBytes]

Originally Posted by lysol

hmm... if i remember correctly there was something about this, back when intel was calling it lightpeak.

Yup.. but "light" could not be used as they could not adapt it to optical system. To they went with copper. Optical is planed later on.. which defeats the purpose of light peak, in a way.

[will_123]

Find me a common place activity that that will require the use of anything greater than a USB3 or SATA 3.0 connection.

So now that we have USB3 and sata 6GB we should just stop advancing with new technology...? If its better than USB3 so why not use it..?

[azazel1024]

Yeah, Thunderbolt is much, much faster. It allows concurrent data AND video over it, and bi-directional 10Gbps. So you have full duplex, plus video casting on the darned thing. For things like notebooks, laptops and tablets, this is huge. You can have one connector that can basically do it all, instead of needing 3 or 4 or 5 connectors. Saves space, and thing is whicked fast.

From everything I have read, thunderbolt is optical capable, is an issue of the cables. Optical thunderbolt cables are going to be fiber optic, with the electrical conversion built in to the cable ends, so "old" thunderbolt ports are going to work with fiber optic cables when they come around. Perks of the fiber cables is you get much longer runs (instead of a 3m limit) and you can push even more data through them at those longer lengths.

Is this the second coming of the messiah...hell no, but it is nifty and better than anything else out there so far.

Firewire has the disadvantage that every port made has to pay a royalty back to the company that created it. Intel is licensing this thing for free. Of course if you are buying the hardware from Intel, Intel isn't going to complain. So firewire has a major disadvantage if you have to both pay for the hardware, and then say pay a $5 royalty back to the company just for having put the port in your device. Intel is charging nothing, unless you buy the hardware from them. USB2/3 is the same way, no royalties, just straight hardware costs.

Just some thoughts on the matter.

[saspro]

Originally Posted by legoman

Gigabit Ethernet beats it anyway with 100Gbits per second. So technically Xerox beats Apple

?

Gigabit Ethernet is 1GB

With the price of 10GB Ethernet products, thunderbolt could be the way forward

[GoodBytes]

No.
It's Gb not GB.
Gigabit is not equal to GigaByte

Manufactures and internet providers, like to use Gigabit and Megabit a lot. Not only it's more exact measurement, but it looks better marketing wise. Despite being a much lower number than what you think it is.

1 Gb (Gigabit) = 0.125 GB (Gigabyte)

[saspro]

Originally Posted by GoodBytes

No.
It's Gb not GB.
Gigabit is not equal to GigaByte

That's me getting forgetting to lift my finger off the shift key in time (maybe a pub lunch was a bad idea)

Still gigabit ethernet can only do 1Gb not 100Gb

[azazel1024]

Only downsides are that Thunderbolt isn't a networking interface. I guess you could create a network using it if you were going to write the different layers to work over it, but everything from the physical layer, to the transport, etc, etc is completely different than ethernet.

Also you only have a 3m cable currently. Not going to be a very big network. Heck, right now USB2.0 is supposedly up to 480Mbps, but you don't really seeing it used as a computer interconnect for a variety of technical reasons.

The way things are going 10GbE is coming sooner rather than later both between price and power consumption. Its not cheap, but you can find copper 10GbE NICs for about $400-500. That is about the same price that 1GbE NICs used to be about 5-6 years ago or maybe a little more. I doubt we'll see integrated 10GbE adapters tomorrow, but we might in another 4 or 5 years on higher end boards, and we'll probably see affordable (under $100) 10GbE NICs in maybe 2 years.

That still isn't caught up with Thunderbolt, but heck w/ ~ 1,000MB/sec speeds with 10GbE, you are maxing out the fastest enterprise hard drives (non-SSD) more than 5 times over at this point, and probably still be maxing out 3 or 4 of them in 5 years time.

[Splynncryth]

IIRC, it's an underlying fabric for other I/O tech to use to allow a common connect of a set of transceivers on the other end to break out that I/O on the other end. I thought thunderbolt was a copper implementation of lightpeak which means it will be bandwidth limited.
The thing that is promising about lightpeak is that the optical connection has the potential to get a PCIe x16 connection outside of the system without using a cable thicker than your thumb. That means that a laptop could get real, upgradable video cards before too much longer and without the myriad of complaints about integrating a powerful video card in the system.
I don't remember anything about the video link, but I would hope it can allow the video to be fed back to the laptop so you can use the laptop's screen.

[will_123]

that means that a laptop could get real, upgradable video cards before too much longer and without the myriad of complaints about integrating a powerful video card in the system

You can get video card updates for your laptop just now using an adapter there was an article in techradar about it couple of months ago. There it is there.

http://www.techradar.com/news/graphi...adaptor-915616

[GoodBytes]

Originally Posted by will_123

You can get video card updates for your laptop just now using an adapter there was an article in techradar about it couple of months ago. There it is there.

http://www.techradar.com/news/graphi...adaptor-915616

Yes, but the problem is that it's SOME laptop, and that it's PCI-E 1x, and if you are absolutely lucky (this includes top of the line system gaming and business class) PCI-E 2x.
Usually, the GPU inside your laptop (unless you took a horrible decision of taking the Intel solution), is going to make your external GPU, be on par, or a tiny bit better (assuming you have a low end Nvidia/AMD graphic card mainly due to the limitation of PCI-E. And if you have actually do have a good laptop GPU as you went with a gaming high-end laptop, then the performance might even be worse (that is all assuming that the express card slot is on PCI-E 1x).