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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."
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.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
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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