News Intel announces Thunderbolt Ready upgrade programme

why would I want something that size, with an ugly cable required out the back, for ONE thunderbolt port?

 

Welcome back to the era of 3DFX Voodoo2 with the main GPU output connected to the 3D accelerator Input ... thanks for this progress Intel . I'd rather use a proper PCIe something daughter board.

 

What a horible afterthought... Atleast there is an option there (of sorts) if you despiratly need it.

 

Seems a bit like a solution looking for a problem.
A quick search of a major retailer shows 20 results on thunderbolt products, versus its competition of USB 3 showing 122.

 

Must reiterate the prevailing opinion - not really getting the point of this.

External PCIe has been done before (certain high-end video capture devices put a four lane PCIe device on the end of a DVI cable, which seemed to work), so if you need that, it's doable already. Thunderbolt seems to be an Apple-style attempt to put everything on one connector as if that helps somehow.

That said, I do wish people would stop comparing Thunderbolt and USB3; they're wildly different.

 

It'll just end the same way SCSI ended .... required a controller card, expensive, too few peripheral --> R.I.P.

 

In what way are they different, they are both interconnects.

 

I'm not so sure if that's really a model; SCSI kept going in higher-end environments until quite recently (and has been replaced by SAS in much the same way as SATA replaced parallel ATA.)

P

 

Thunderbolt, as a data connection, is effectively a raw single PCIe lane, whereas USB has all kinds of intelligence which allows it to do a lot more routing and timesharing. In the broadest possible terms, USB is much "smarter", although obviously there's a downside to that in terms of latency and bandwidth.

Also, thunderbolt is at least twice and possibly four times the native speed. Thunderbolt includes displayport (for some Appleish reason), too.

They may under some circumstances allow people to do similar things, but the tech is very different.

P

 

It would be nice if they copied the sony approach and added the optic fibres to a USB port...

 

Yes, but in all honestly, beside storage and scanner the SCSI was not used. SCSI was daisy chainable too (via a device ID you has to set on the peripheral).

 

And you think your average Jo Blog's cares about how they work ?
Apart from the small niche use market most people only care if they can use that hole in the front of their PC to plug their shiny new something in.

I know architecturally they are worlds apart, but most people only care if they can buy what they need for a reasonable price.

 

Well, actually, yeah - because the architecture makes it impossible (or at least unreasonably difficult) to create a Thunderbolt PCIe card, which is what everyone keeps asking for. So in that sense yes.

 

Who is this everyone ?
From what i can tell very few people are asking for a Thunderbolt PCIe card, some people may have a need for one, but my guess is that's a very small market.

 

Would make more sense for laptops if external GPU's are ever going move from being a niche product...

 

If it needs a DP output as as Input and some GPIO ... I do not see why they couldn't make a card which creates a DP (small GPU), but instead of placing the DP connector they could reroute the signal to the DP --> TB stage of the card. Since with Intel solution you can use either the IGP displayPort or one from a discrete GPU ....

in short PCIe --> Display port --> thunderbolt, all in a single card. Except the possible "too high price tag", I do not see how this is not acievable. This sounds more like a "Do it dirty and cheap" vs "Do it clean but expensive".

 

Rather than making these add-on cards, why not provide Thunderbolt as standard on new motherboards? Is there really a huge market for upgrading current motherboards to Thunderbolt? Thunderbolt peripherals are rather limited, I'm sure most people will be happy to wait until thir next upgrade.