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Why Thunderbolt Is Dead In the Water
adeelarshad82 writes "In the same way that Apple championed FireWire for the replacement of parallel SCSI, Thunderbolt is meant as the next big thing in video and audio peripheral interfaces. Plus, it's Apple's move to beat USB 3.0. However, Thunderbolt is off to a slow start, for a number of reasons — from cost to the technology's features in comparison to USB 3.0 — which is why it may be dead in the water."
Actually, it comes from Intel, and is the former LightPeak they've been showing off for the past few years. Apple is simply the first OEM to pick it up in their hardware.
That much is obvious, yes. But if you read the article, you will see that the author's primary problem with Thunderbolt is that it offers practically no improvement over USB3, while cutting out the backwards compatibility that was originally intended in the LightPeak demo. Combine that with the high cost of entry, and why would anyone want to switch to the new technology? Without high volume, the price will never come down. THAT is what the author meant.
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Well, it used to be called Light Peak, and it's an Intel technology that Apple is championing. It's all Intel. It's basically DisplayPort plus x2 PCIe.
The Thunderbolt name is actually trademarked by Intel, so they're probably going to promote it heavily.
And Intel is promoting it heavily - the Intel chipsets all have Thunderbolt controllers built in. Whereas, if you wanted USB 3.0, the manufacturer will have to throw in a separate chip and supporting components for that - USB 3.0 isn't coming to Intel chipsets until next year.
This is an issue as laptop manufacturers who want USB 3.0 have to throw in a separate chip (lots of $$$) and its support components, while Thunderbolt comes "for free". At least, if the laptop runs Intel chips with an Intel chipset.
As for dead in the water - it's hard to tell. A lot of manufacturers have thrown their hats into the ring of Thunderbolt accessories - hard drives, capture carts, etc. It can provide up to 10W of power (4x USB, but short of FireWire power), plus with daisy chaining and the like.
The best answer is that it's really to replace FireWire moreso than supplant USB 3.0. FW3200 is pretty much dead.
Intel did. Intel designed and developed the tech, and Apple just came to them and said "Hey, here's some ideas for the final implementation, and we'd like to put it in our devices soon." It is an Intel technology, and one in development for quite awhile.
It is targeted at something of a different market from USB3. It is more expensive for devices to implement, and less secure, since it is really just an external PCIe port. However that means full DMA, low latency and so on.
They are complimentary technologies.
No it won't. USB will be the next USB. The connector is too common now to ever be replaced as the default digital interface for most things. It's on the front of my car radio, for damn sake.
A good parallel is the 3.5mm headphone jack. Frankly, it's stupidly large and poorly designed for what it needs to do (USB isn't). But it will never be replaced by another (wired) connector in it's application space. There's just too many of them, and it's hard to make a compelling case for replacement for 98% of users.
That is a bad analogy. The 3.5mm jack is easy to use because there is no wrong way to plug it in. Now the USB connector on the other hand is crap because a lot of people probably have to make two or three tries before then can plug something in. It is a really poor design which is only marginally better than those stupid PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports.
Now the Thunderbolt connector, on the other hand, has just one right way that you can try to even plug it in. It is easy to see which side is up.
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You just spent 3 sentences telling people why anyone who argues differently from you is wrong, yet you provided not a single reason. The only fact you provided is easily disproven:
Right now, on newegg, im only seeing USB3.0 on highend multi-hundred-dollar motherboards, so it seems to be a wash in that regard.
Most certainly not! I see 29 USB 3.0 motherboards less than $100 at newegg.. The $500 HTPC I bought this year has 2 USB 3.0 ports, as does my 8 month old laptop. By next year even the low-end will have it because manufacturers will have unloaded their USB 2.0 chipset boards.
My understanding is that USB3 has a max theoretical transfer rate of 4 GB/s while Thunderbolt is at 10 GB/s per channel giving 20 GB/s total. Also overhead limits USB3 having a peak of 3.2 GB/s. Thunderbolt is designed more to replace eSATA and FireWire than USB.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I still have a Mac with HDI-45 connector for Apple's AudioVision 14 display. The monitor died years ago (Florida thunder storm) but was nice, having ADB connections on it. And I'm currently using 4 Apple ADC monitors, each on $100 adapter box that allows me to connect their single cable connection up to a modern Intel Mac.
Do I like the idea of single cable monitors? Hell yeah!
Do I think they'll take off? Eh... not likely. And I'm still bummed Firewire never took off as AV equipment interconnects. Would make my home theater setup a lot cleaner.
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The author is an idiot. Comparing USB and thunderbolt just proves it. Thunderbold will expose pci-express lanes to external devices. USB does not even have DMA.
You mean no improvement other than basically making the PCI Express bus available to any device that wants to use it?
No improvement other than running TWO bi-directional 10 Gbps channels through a single connector? (4x USB 3.0)
No improvement other than allowing manufacturers to build Firewire, eSATA, USB, and even USB 3.0 adaptors and docks connecting to a single port?
No improvement other than (in the future) allowing you to snap in a MagSafe power cord and get power AND Thunderbolt connectivity?
No improvement other than letting you run multiple monitors simultaneously? (new iMac)
Those "no improvements"?
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Actually, that's not true. Thunderbolt provides a significant win over USB 3 in nearly every way. The author just doesn't get it.
First, Thunderbolt is based on PCIe for transport. That means that it's a very lightweight protocol, unlike USB, which is very heavyweight. For things like audio interfaces, USB 3 is dead in the water because it offers no advantages over USB 2 (because throughput doesn't matter past a certain point). Thunderbolt, by contrast, should offer a significant advantage in latency over FireWire (and a huge advantage over USB 2), while requiring less CPU overhead than USB or FireWire.
Second, it's entirely unclear to me why anyone supports USB 3 at all. For hard drives and similar, USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA. For almost all other devices, USB 3 offers no advantages over USB 2. So ignoring portable devices that only have room for one port, USB 3 is a solution in search of a problem.
Third, the author doesn't know what he's saying about copper being "crippled". It's not crippled at all. Thunderbolt is intended to eventually be supplemented with new cables that have an optical PHY (transceiver) inside the cable instead of on the logic board. Such a design provides exactly the same advantages as LP (distance), but without all the problems that optical interconnects inherently suffer. To describe thunderbolt as "crippled" because it uses wires is to fail to understand the technology at all. It's exactly as fast as Light Peak was originally intended to be for its initial rollout.
Fourth, using LP in a USB connector turns out to be a bad idea in general. USB is a great interconnect for low bandwidth devices. It's not so great for talking to displays. With desktops tending to go under the desk, and with more and more people using laptops with external displays at home, there's good reason for wanting all of your external devices to be plugged into your display. Sharing a single data connection for your display cable and your peripherals is a tremendous win—so much so that support for transport of USB data was actually built into the original DisplayPort specification. Thus, Thunderbolt shouldn't be thought of necessarily as a replacement for USB, but rather as a replacement for other display technologies. With Thunderbolt, you could trivially build a monitor that provides full-performance, low-latency FireWire, USB, and eSATA connectors on top of your desk. Try that with USB 3.0.
Finally, the cost of Thunderbolt hardware is probably greatly exaggerated. Sure, it probably does cost $90 to add TB into a motherboard design right now, but that's because A. it isn't integrated into the motherboard chipsets yet (wait for Ivy Bridge), and B. it likely requires a significant board redesign to free up enough PCIe lanes to support the metric crapton of bandwidth involved.
Thunderbolt will become a lot more interesting when Intel starts integrating it into their chipsets in Ivy Bridge. Until then, it's really not feasible to most folks to start using it yet. Thus, it's not at all a surprise that adoption has been slow. Right now, it's basically at the developer preview stage, with AFAIK exactly one working motherboard implementation (Apple's).... The author should at least wait until Ivy Bridge before making predictions about the technology....
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External DMA is extremely useful - it dramatically reduces system load when accessing storage devices (whether single drives or drive arrays). This lets a notebook be used for data-intensive work (like video and photo work) with minimal overhead. DMA makes the difference between a pleasant experience and whimpering in the corner.
Claiming that external DMA is horrible idea is disingenuous; winlockpwn (or FireWire, or Thunderbolt) requires physical access to the machine, at which point security becomes a non-issue because there is none - DMA has nothing to do with it. If an attacker has physical access to a machine, the game is over.
More to the point: Winlockpwn is not a weakness of DMA, but in how Windows uses DMA. Windows has enough remote security problems; we don't need to go into the problems it has when an attacker has physical access.
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