First Thunderbolt Peripherals Arrive To Market

MojoKid writes "Promise Technology recently launched the first Thunderbolt-compatible devices; the company's Pegasus RAID R4 and R6 storage solutions can now be ordered from the Apple Store. There's a catch, however. In order to use either storage array, one must first purchase a cable directly from Apple. The company has priced the two-meter cable at $50. As it turns out, Thunderbolt uses what's called an active cable. Inside the cable there's a pair of Gunnum GN2033 transceivers. The GN2033 is a tiny, low power transceiver chip designed to be placed inside the connectors at either end of a Thunderbolt cable, enabling dual bidirectional 10Gb/s concurrent links over narrow-gauge copper wires. The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence. Apple is the only company currently selling Thunderbolt cables."

Comments

or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe, once production is ramped up, prices will go down. Since that's what generally happens with new technology.

Re:or maybe

[Serenissima]

That's crazy talk. This is Slashdot. Where anything remotely related to Apple or Microsoft must be met with derision! There's no need to bring logic or common sense into the discussion!

Re:or maybe

[DurendalMac]

Not to mention Apple usually pricing peripherals highly. Third party vendors will step in like they always do and offer a cheaper alternative.

Oh, and Mojokid is a retard. I always have to laugh at the morons calling Firewire dead and obsolete. It's still alive and kicking in the pro A/V world, you idiots. Firewire audio decks are quite common. A lot of pro-grade cameras still connect via Firewire.

Re:or maybe

[artor3]

Yep, not knowing about firewire's use in a niche market certainly makes someone a retard and a moron.

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[Grail]

I have a FireWire/USB disk enclosure, and regularly get double the throughput on FireWire 800 versus USB 2.0 (contemporaneous standards). It might be just my imagination, but the disk is quieter when running under FireWire.

So anyone who thinks the standard is "dead" is simply in denial.

I'd make an ad hominem attack about such people being happy gluing $20k worth of plastic onto a $10k car instead of buying the $25k car to start with, but I'm not normally that kind of person.

Re:or maybe

[artor3]

The real question is whether the added speed is enough to justify moving away from the USB standard. Yes, it's twice as fast. But we're already at the point where a full-length high definition movie can be transferred in seconds. That is, if -- and this is a big if -- the storage media can keep up. For most people, there's simply no compelling reason to pay extra for Thunderbolt.

The summary says it's currently being used for RAID configurations. That's a sensible use. But I doubt it will make much headway with consumers.

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[Professr3]

I'll be sure to let NBC know that their pro A/V studios are a niche market...

Re:or maybe

[artor3]

How many "pro A/V studios" would you say are in circulation? Please express your answer as a percentage of the billions of computers, phones, mp3 players, and other consumer electronics that are sold every single year.

Don't bother calling NBC. They already know.

Re:or maybe

[tlhIngan]

The summary says it's currently being used for RAID configurations. That's a sensible use. But I doubt it will make much headway with consumers.

How about some high-bandwidth situations? Like perhaps having a nice mobile device with Thunderbolt with long battery life, then plug it into your Thunderbolt dock and you suddenly have kickass gaming graphics and all that fun stuff?

Hell, perhaps we'd see stuff like GigE network dongles and stuff - if you're mobile and using WiFI all day, then plug it in at home and you have gigabit connectivity.

Right now, people use it because it's crazy fast for drives. But it's likely Intel sees it as the future of mobile devices - optimized highly for mobile use with long battery life by keeping all the power hungry stuff in a dock - high-end graphics, wired networking, etc.

It's basically a cable-ized version of PCIe.

Re:or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

The main advantage that I see in Thunderbolt over USB is its low latency. USB is useless for real-time control, because of its high latency, leaving only various flavors of industrial ethernet and the hope that Thunderbolt will displace USB.

Re:or maybe

[countertrolling]

Not without some competition they won't. And Apple's patents will ensure there's very little competition

Re:or maybe

[tjonnyc999]

And what was wrong with fiber-optic or the, hell, IDK, over 9000 other connection standards that have already been developed, real-world-tested and debugged, and have cheap, easily produced components?

But oh no, this is Apple.

Well, as long as the idiot public continues to purchase substandard products at a premium price (because people never learn), Apple will continue to get away with this BS. It's illogical, slightly funny, and really sad, but apparently "shiny white plastic > logical analysis of specifications, price, and suitability".

Re:or maybe

[c0lo]

or maybe, once production is ramped up, prices will go down. Since that's what generally happens with new technology.

How many times you saw an Apple product's price going down?

Re:or maybe

[Wyatt Earp]

Have you ever bought a consumer, prosumer or professional video camera?

They all have 4 (i.Link) or 6 pin Firewire 400 or Firewire 800 ports

Re:or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite often... my Macbook Air (original model, no SSD, cheapest version) was $1799... the new (faster, SSD, etc.) models are like $1000 for specs that exceed my 2008 model. That's only slightly more than 50% of the price, and the form factor is smaller too.

(And the iPhone dropped in price fast enough to piss some people off...)

Re:or maybe

[RoFLKOPTr]

Yep, not knowing about firewire's use in a niche market certainly makes someone a retard and a moron.

When you make the bold claim that FireWire is obsolete, you had better check your sources. The A/V industry is hardly a niche market seeing how it produces nearly everything that today's public uses for entertainment. Sure, FireWire didn't make it in the consumer market, but that's because USB was already around and USB 2.0 came out at about the same time as FireWire and boasted better speed (even though it is rarely capable of reaching that speed in actual use). Most PCs came with FireWire ports for a few years, but consumer video devices started more and more to use flash storage rather than tape and realtime video capture (which is what FireWire is primarily used for) became unnecessary.

FireWire is still used in professional video production, which still primarily uses tape for primary video storage before being captured to a PC... and for those that do use digital storage methods, FireWire 800 can transfer 1080p video files ridiculously fast. USB 3.0 is apparently capable of 5Gb/s, though, so we'll see if the tide turns that way in the next couple years.

Re:or maybe

[RoFLKOPTr]

Not without some competition they won't. And Apple's patents will ensure there's very little competition

Intel owns the rights to Thunderbolt technology and trademarks. Apple helped develop it, which is why they happen to have the first cables and devices on the market.

Re:or maybe

[bucky0]

You do realize that this was technology developed by intel, right? Also, there's a LOT more to thunderbolt than just the physical layer that makes it sexy.

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[incer]

By that reasoning, computers are a niche compared to the sale of trillions of cigarettes that are sold every single year.

Re:or maybe

[Concerned Onlooker]

"Of course, wine consumption and computer product purchase/use/possession have nothing in common..."

Kind of like your post and this topic.

Re:or maybe

[Joce640k]

... laugh at the morons calling Firewire dead and obsolete. It's still alive and kicking in the pro A/V world, you idiots.

So is Betamax...

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[Half-pint HAL]

Wait... the standard isn't dead because you still use it? I think I'll pull out my C64 and prove that audio tapes isn't dead as a medium for computer programs....

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[Jah-Wren Ryel]

By that reasoning, computers are a niche compared to the sale of trillions of cigarettes that are sold every single year.

Yea, because just like computers are an integral part of every pro a/v studio so are cigarettes an integral part of every computer. .derp.

Re:or maybe

[Joce640k]

I thought USB 3,0 already solved that...

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[Relyx]

You are thinking of Betacam, which is the high-end off-shoot of Betamax. Nowadays though HDCAM and HDCAM SR tapes will have taken over for HD footage.

Re:or maybe

[drb_chimaera]

Well, that's not exactly suprising - USB2 tops out at 480MBit while FW800 runs at.... yep, you guessed it, 800Mbit - All other things being equal you'd expect it to be roughly double the speed...

Re:or maybe

[incer]

Seems like your reading comprehension needs some work:

How many "pro A/V studios" would you say are in circulation? Please express your answer as a percentage of the billions of computers, phones, mp3 players, and other consumer electronics that are sold every single year.

What do mp3 players and phones have to do with "pro a/v studio[s]"?

And anyway Firewire IS an integral part of every pro A/V studio. So your argument is flawed in every possible way. Derp.

Re:or maybe

[billius]

I realize he put it in a rather asinine way, but I too was shocked to hear that they called firewire obsolete. The line between pro and amateur continues to blur as technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Sweetwater Music has three pages of firewire audio interfaces, for example.

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[DrXym]

So anyone who thinks the standard is "dead" is simply in denial.

Firewire isn't dead. It's just an also ran which is slowly losing relevance and mainstream support. I expect you'll be able to buy Firewire devices for a while to come but you can expect a premium to do it. It's clear with Thunderbolt that even Apple intend to dump it at some point.

Re:or maybe

[DrXym]

I expect people who want speed could just use eSATA devices & cables. Most external hard disk enclosures have a SATA device in the middle and bridge circuitry to convert between USB / Firewire protocols and SATA. All of that incurs a performance overhead which can be eliminated by using eSATA. It probably explains why so many PCs are shipping with eSATA ports these days.

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[sincewhen]

Plenty. Don't be a jerk.

Re:or maybe

[drsmithy]

I expect people who want speed could just use eSATA devices & cables.

eSATA was effectively DOA due to its inability to provide power.

That it's essentially only capable of providing connectivity to block devices was merely another nail.

Re:or maybe

[scubamage]

Honestly, most cables are priced strangely. Ever buy a power cable from HP? It'll set you back 20$. For a NEMA 15 power cable. Printer cables were always notoriously expensive too. Adding in two transceivers I think actually justifies a slightly higher price in my opinion (still inflated, just not as much as a HDMI cable). Still, they're operating out where there be dragons. It'd be neat to see it take off, but I'd greatly prefer a standardized IEEE solution like firewire.

Re:or maybe

[scubamage]

I'm pretty sure firewire has always been adored in the pro a/v market, actually. Just like macs. It is something they do very well. I'd have thought that was fairly well known. Maybe that's just because I've set up at least 10-15 video/sound/graphics labs in my time. Dunno

Re:or maybe

[scubamage]

I'm betting that USB3.0 will be extremely bursty, just like USB1/2 (it is the same underlying technology, after all). Firewire has always been far better at maintaining a steady flow of data which is where it really pays off in the a/v world.

Re:or maybe

[MoonBuggy]

I think the point was "Computing devices in total" (which includes smartphones and MP3 players like the iPod touch) compared to "Computing devices for which firewire is a necessity", which is a tiny fraction of the former, but still a subset of it, making the comparison apt. Cigarettes sold bears no relation to computers sold, so the comparison is meaningless.

Re:or maybe

[c0lo]

Plenty. Don't be a jerk.

Buddy, that's just a question. I never experienced any (because I haven't own any Apple products), but I'm not saying that there aren't any, just asking.

The only signals that I have (from /.) are:
a. Apple products are expensive
b. Apple tries to dictate minimal prices in the event of promotions or "stock sale"

I have another question, if you are so kind: in comparison with other computer/smart-phone brands, how fast does Apple reduce the prices?

Re:or maybe

[scubamage]

The design behind thunderbolt is intel, not apple. They just partnered with apple to get it out into production. The technology is actually pretty nifty; unlike other interfaces where you're dealing with a separate controller, thunderbolt basically creates an external pci-express port. So, anything a normal expansion card can do can now be made modular. It's got some very sexy potential. Imagine never having to get more than a decent proc and ram because video cards now plug into your laptop's thunderbolt port. You could have thunderbolt enabled televisions which include a graphics adapter. There's some cool potential. Let's see if it actually gets off the ground though.

Re:or maybe

[spheric_harlot]

iPods got progressively cheaper, but were later replaced by higher-end Flash devices. The entry price for the iPod touch is still substantially lower than the original iPod in October 2001. The original iPhone got cheaper within months. iBooks got progressively cheaper over their lifespan. Just in the space of the last year, we've seen price drops for iMacs, Mac mini, MacBook, MacBook Air, and (in Europe) MacBook Pros.

Re:or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

FireWire is also prevalent in audio recording, where very low latency and low CPU usage are critical. USB devices are also available in this market, but only in the low end. Practically all high-end audio interfaces are either FireWire, or less often, a proprietary PCI board.

Re:or maybe

[NJRoadfan]

Tapeless AVC-HD cameras of all levels don't have them. HDV MPEG-2 cameras do, its only a matter of time until those cameras are phased out in the pro market (HDV is practically extinct in the consumer market). Studios primarily use SDI as an interconnect between equipment.

Re:or maybe

[E IS mC(Square)]

It does not count if apple does not support it.

Re:or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

A/V Industry would be a niche market out of the entire storage market. Just because they produce a lot of public entertainment in no way assumes that they are going to be purchasing tons more technology than every other consumer. They are a subset of the entire market, hence a niche market.

Re:or maybe

[datapharmer]

ahem... first generation ipods and almost all mini dv camcorders sold over the last decade and a half as well as home studio recording equipment.... add it all up and there's a lot out there both in professional and prosumer space. Not to say it is as common as usb by a long shot, but most high end pcs and macs shipped with support for many years and cables did not cost $50 as the devices contained the chipset instead of the cable. Just replace firewire with scsi and you will realize how ridiculous this all is. No, not everyone and their dumb cousin know what firewire or scsi or any other connector is called. Ask someone for a d-sub connector at best buy and they will look at you funny, but they will be happy to point you to the computer monitor cables... people are dumb.

The bigger issue here is the cable cost, which I would argue may be apple doing everyone a favor - you have one thunderbolt port, but several peripherals to use with it. If you buy 1 cable that has $20 in chips in it that is still less than adding $10 to the base price of every peripheral device and having a dumb cable with more expensive devices. That said cables break more often than the connected devices, so at the end of the day I say ehhh... who cares wait for it to die or become ubiquitous.

Re:or maybe

[datapharmer]

by that argument how is it that my firewire 400 devices are far faster than by usb 2 devices? It ain't all about industry speed claims, some of it comes down to real life. Now get off my lawn.

Re:or maybe

[datapharmer]

actually apple has offered fiber channel for many years as an expansion card. It is just too expensive for a consumer device at this point.

Re:or maybe

[Sponge Bath]

Given Apple's recent history with the limited acceptance of the very capable Firewire interconnect technology, MojoKid raises the possibility of limited acceptance of Apple's push of the very capable Thunderbolt interconnect technology. Sounds logical and sensible to me. You would have to be in the grip of a KoolAid enema psychosis to deny it is a possibility.

Re:or maybe

[drb_chimaera]

Like I said, all other things being equal. They aren't - Firewire and USB handle data transfer in *very* different ways - I can't remember the specifics but from memory assuming a common total file size USB2 is faster for a small number of large files while Firewire is faster for lots of smaller files

Re:or maybe

[v1]

I move large quantities of data around between drives all the time, and it's a PAIN to have to deal with usb. It's always slower. FW800 I can reliably expect 78-79MB/sec. FW400 is 38-39MB/sec. USB2(480) I see anywhere from 8 to 26 usually, but lately new computers and adapters will do 32-36. It's all over the board, and always slower than FW400, and 800 just smokes it.

So far I've seen a grand total of two USB3 devices, and both were being used on USB2 - I have yet to encounter a computer with a USB3 port on it. So I wonder what synthetic substance the GP is smoking telling us firewire has already become obsolete? I'll take FW800 over USB any day, and so will anyone with half a clue.

My opinion of USB may change when I actually get to use USB3, and thunderbolt I have high hopes for. But I've got a few esata devices right now, and they max out the hard drive they're attached to. Admittedly not FAST hard drives, but one for example is a good quad enclosure from macsales, usb2, fw400, fw800, esata. But that makes a great test case. 36 USB2, 39 FW400, 79 FW800, and only 89 esata. But 89 is the practical sustained max from the hard drive. So really, thunderbolt isn't going to be that much more impressive than FW800 unless you're dealing with fast hard drives on both ends. I don't think people are realizing this.

That and I've always had a bitter taste in my mouth from USB since they were sneaky and renamed standards to help manufacturers unload all the USB(12) motherboards collecting dust in the warehouse. You'll recall we HAD "usb1.1"(1.2) and "usb1.2"(12), and nobody would buy mobos with USB 1.2 in them when USB2(480) came out. So they renamed the standard to "usb1.1(1.2), "usb2 full speed"(12) and "usb2 high speed"(480) so when the suckers asked "but does this mobo have USB 1 or USB2 in it?" they got told it has USB2 and bought the crap off their hands. Playing dirty tricks like that on the consumer saves you from losing money from your mistake today at the cost of losing customer confidence tomorrow. I personally will never forgive them for that. I was smart enough not to get burned by it, but I know a number of people that DID get cheated. Remember, USB2 Full Speed moves data around at no faster than about 1mb/sec. How would you like to have that in your computer? All those people then had to run out and buy a USB2 High Speed card after having built their computer with a USB2 motherboard in it. OK my rant's done.

Re:or maybe

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

I expect people who want speed could just use eSATA devices & cables.

eSATA was effectively DOA due to its inability to provide power.

That it's essentially only capable of providing connectivity to block devices was merely another nail.

eSATA seems to be doing pretty well for a DOA technology. It's on a huge number of external disks, external disk enclosures, motherboards, and cases. It's even on a lot of laptops these days. I love my eSATA hard disk dock. I don't know how I ever got along without one.

Re:or maybe

[ommerson]

This will be interesting to watch: whilst for applications such as storage and HD cameras, IEEE1394 isn't cutting it any more, it's more than adequate for music production applications, and Thunderbolt will do nothing but add cost to these devices. The acid test will be Apple dropping the FW S-800 port off their products.

Re:or maybe

[bakawolf]

Uh, NONE of those have dropped in price. In fact, the Unibody Mac Mini is now significantly more expensive than its pre-unibody candidate. Where are you getting these ideas?

Re:or maybe

[jedidiah]

Then don't apply it to the market at large. Simply apply it to those companies willing to spend MILLIONS on either software or computing hardware.

The comparison still won't be in NBCs favor.

Or you could just explicitly call it an Apple videocam cable.

Re:or maybe

[blueg3]

A niche market is a small market within a larger market for the same product. Not for different products.

Professional A/V studios are certainly a niche market in terms of the sale of general-purpose computer hardware. You're falsely thinking that a niche market is necessarily worthless.

Re:or maybe

[jedidiah]

My firewire camera is a relic that I gave to the kid because it was so obsolete and annoying and because it was superceded by a much newer and much nicer USB camera. A lot of those firewire devices out there are likely playthings for small children, languishing in boxes, or already rotting in a land fill.

Re:or maybe

[jedidiah]

eSATA is kind of like SCSI on the consumer high end. It's something that you would want to use to connect an external RAID array to your PC. On the low end, it is redundant because of USB. So you've got an obvious situation where USB is bound to crowd eSATA out of the high end. There just aren't that many people buying arrays.

Although there is a matter of degree even there. The more you overprice the solution, the fewer people you will find willing to pay for it.

As far as eSATA "being dead" goes, I see it on a lot of new equipment these days. Of course that gear doesn't come from Apple.

Re:or maybe

[TheRaven64]

Apple helped develop it, which is why they happen to have the first cables and devices on the market.

I doubt that's the reason, given that Apple's cables are using third-party chips. It's more likely that Apple is selling cables for the same reason that Apple is selling mini DisplayPort adaptors: they're selling the first machines with the port and so they need the cables to be on the market quickly, and the best way of guaranteeing that is to make them themselves (and get a nice profit from them).

Re:or maybe

[PNutts]

The real question is whether the added speed is enough to justify moving away from the USB standard. Yes, it's twice as fast. But we're already at the point where a full-length high definition movie can be transferred in seconds. That is, if -- and this is a big if -- the storage media can keep up. For most people, there's simply no compelling reason to pay extra for Thunderbolt.

The summary says it's currently being used for RAID configurations. That's a sensible use. But I doubt it will make much headway with consumers.

That sounds like at "640K ought to be enough for anybody" remark.

Re:or maybe

[vijayiyer]

You've never priced out fibre channel cables and drives then. $50 is chap in comparison.

Re:or maybe

[Belial6]

No need. They already know.

Re:or maybe

[Belial6]

eSATA is an obvious solution because it is basically a passive adapter. It isn't a killer new technology, it is just a more durable way of hanging your SATA ports out the back of your computer. It falls into the "why not?" category. eSATA will stop making sense when internal SATA is no longer in use.

Re:or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two features necessary for the price to drop, assuming there isn't some price floor due to material or process costs. The first is volume, as you point out. The other is competition. If Apple remains the exclusive supplier the price will not drop. What is the likelihood of non-Apple manufacturers appearing? Apple is a pretty hostile IP company... it may happen, but then again it may not.

Re:or maybe

[dgatwood]

Actually, I'm told that Thunderbolt has the potential for improving clock accuracy when clocking interfaces to one another without the use of a separate word clock or ADAT cable.

Also, Thunderbolt should beat FireWire (which beats USB) at round trip latency.

So there may actually be real benefits to using TB for audio in the future.

Re:or maybe

[dgatwood]

And yet, not all FireWire camcorders are relics. Just saying.

Re:or maybe

[dgatwood]

And HDCAM is a high-end offshoot of DigiBeta, which was a high end offshoot of Betacam/Betacam SP, which....

Re:or maybe

[drsmithy]

eSATA seems to be doing pretty well for a DOA technology. It's on a huge number of external disks, external disk enclosures, motherboards, and cases. It's even on a lot of laptops these days. I love my eSATA hard disk dock. I don't know how I ever got along without one.

eSATA is a niche, like firewire. Everyone I know has at least one - sometimes several - USB drives (several of those drives also have eSATA interfaces, but they're never used). One person other than me connects their drive using eSATA.

eSATA will never break out of the niche it is currently in. A proliferation of ports is meaningless without peripherals plugged into them.

Re:or maybe

[RoFLKOPTr]

Apple helped develop it, which is why they happen to have the first cables and devices on the market.

I doubt that's the reason, given that Apple's cables are using third-party chips. It's more likely that Apple is selling cables for the same reason that Apple is selling mini DisplayPort adaptors: they're selling the first machines with the port and so they need the cables to be on the market quickly, and the best way of guaranteeing that is to make them themselves (and get a nice profit from them).

And they wouldn't be able to have anything in production yet without having been involved in the development process, and they wouldn't be involved in the development process if they weren't planning on using the interface in their products very soon, so you're basically saying the same thing. Also, Mini DisplayPort was a proprietary plug used only by Apple before it was adopted into the DisplayPort standard. They were the ONLY ones selling the machines with their proprietary port so they could be the ONLY ones selling cables that worked with their proprietary port.

Re:or maybe

[ommerson]

Clock recovery with firewire audio streams is already pretty damn accurate - and it's entirely possible to achieve sample-accurate presentation. Yamaha's mLAN chipsets had this capability, and I suspect TC's DICE family of devices can too.

Also, extremely low latency is achievable. I can't remember the precise numbers at this juncture, but the limiting factor is the latency hit of a short bus reset. Winding latency down to a couple of milliseconds in each direction is doable.

The limiting factor tends to be the software generating or consuming the audio stream - in practice this usually involves a couple of real-time threads getting woken up perhaps every millisecond to work on a small amount of data - which invariably involves a read, modify (e.g. DSP of some kind) and then write somewhere else - possibly with interleaving for large channels counts.. This starts looking like a pathologically cache-ineffecient workload that doesn't improve much as CPUs get faster.

Re:or maybe

[TheRaven64]

And they wouldn't be able to have anything in production yet without having been involved in the development process

Yes they would, they're buying third-party chips implementing the requirements. Any other company could have done the same without being involved in the development process. No other company needed to, because so far Apple is the only one selling computers with Thunderbolt ports, so no other company has a vested interest in ensuring that cables are available. Now that there are computers and peripherals available, there is an established market for cables, so other companies will likely enter this market. When there were only computers, the lack of cables added an additional barrier to entry to companies making peripherals (they'd have needed to build their own active cables), which Apple sought to remove by selling their own.

Apple did not ship anything with Thunderbolt until after Intel had released the specs and the chips. Any other manufacturer could have launched laptops with Thunderbolt at the same time as Apple, and any other company could have produced cables at the same time as Apple.

Re:or maybe

[RoFLKOPTr]

You appear to be oblivious to the fact that even though the parts to build the cables may be readily available, it still takes R&D time and money to create new cables and devices that support Thunderbolt. Since Apple was a major player in the development of the interface itself, they were able to develop their own products that supported it while also keeping up to date on the latest modifications to spec and also having major input on the specs to better suit their own needs. By the time the Thunderbolt specifications were finalized, Apple likely already had plenty of different working prototypes (and perhaps even finished products ready for market) of existing products modified to use Thunderbolt. Those who weren't part of the development process weren't privy to the specifications unless they were released to the public, so they didn't have any way to come up with prototypes before then.

Re:or maybe

[Stupendoussteve]

Pretty likely, actually. There are third party DisplayPort cables and dongles even though this port is only used by Apple. I would not be surprised if third parties eventually make cheaper versions of these cables, though the R&D time may slow them down, the technology behind it is Intel, not Apple.

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[incer]

Just like mp3 players sold bear no relation to PRO A/V equipment sold.

Re:or maybe

[macs4all]

And what was wrong with fiber-optic or the, hell, IDK, over 9000 other connection standards that have already been developed, real-world-tested and debugged, and have cheap, easily produced components?

But oh no, this is Apple.

Bzzt! Wrong again, Chucko! TB was developed by Intel. Apple just helped out with some specs, like, I would guess, the time-synchronization stuff that will make this rock for A/V applications.

Re:or maybe

[macs4all]

Apple is a pretty hostile IP company

...He typed on his Webkit-powered browser...

Re:or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

"or maybe, once production is ramped up, prices will go down. Since that's what generally happens with new technology."

Except when it's branded, "Apple".

If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad...

[crafty.munchkin]

Just wait for Monster Cables to bring out their gold plated $800 Thunderbolt cable!

Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad...

[bucky0]

what matters is that it is special, Apple-born and exlcusive therefore carrying high profit margin.

Intel made it and owns the rights to it, apple just helped develop it. It's hardly "apple-born"

Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad...

[mcvos]

That won't stop Apple from taking credit for this incredible innovation before it tanks.

Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Blasphemy, take it back!! :(

Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad...

[ilsaloving]

Hey now... those cables are really good! Compared to those cheap generic thunderbolt cables, the ones are straighter and the zeros are more nicely rounded and symmetrical.

Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad...

[s0lar]

Dude, that will be a real value for money. Imagine the claim: "you can hear the difference when playing your crummy old 128K MP3s". Or, perhaps, they should just move into the "fashion accessories" niche and just acknowledge that they add real mother of pearl, white gold and diamonds to a perfectly capable digital piece of kit?

Yikes

[Spigot the Bear]

I'm going to have to take out a mortgage on my house to get the monster cable version.

WTF is Thunderbolt?

[farseeker]

WTF is Thunderbolt?

Re:WTF is Thunderbolt?

[Guy Harris]

WTF is Thunderbolt?

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm.

Re:WTF is Thunderbolt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google it you mouth-breathing moron.

Re:WTF is Thunderbolt?

[ozmanjusri]

Google it you mouth-breathing moron.

Mouth-breathing morons use Bing, you insensitive clod!

Re:WTF is Thunderbolt?

[antifoidulus]

An underrated coaster at Kennywood(an underrated amusement park IMO)?

Re:WTF is Thunderbolt?

[Belial6]

It sounds like you have a problem with people who have sinus problems? Has someone with sinus problems treated you badly at some point?

Re:WTF is Thunderbolt?

[farseeker]

define:thunderbolt

thunderbolt/THndrblt/Noun
1. A flash of lightning with a simultaneous crash of thunder.
2. A supposed bolt or shaft believed to be the destructive agent in a lightning flash, esp. as an attribute of a god such as Jupiter or Thor.

No thanks

[Dishwasha]

I'm going to hold off on buying these because everybody knows Monster Cables are the best. Their sweet gold-plated impedance really accentuates the harmonics of my digital bits, giving my data soft warm tones and the largest acoustical threshold range that guarantees that my ones are as oney as they can be and my zeros actually stop the measurements in my voltmeter because all the electrons are at a complete standstill. I mean seriously Apple, $50? You're practically admitting that these cables are just junk.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed, they're bound to be much more danceable cables

Re:No thanks

[EdZ]

No no no no, people are starting to realise that digital means you can't claim that sort of nonsense about cables anymore.
No, you have to blame everything on jitter nowadays! Yep, them cheapy cables means that certain electrons will actually travel at a different speed somehow (fat electrons getting stuck in the kinks?) so the clock signal and the data become desynchronised. And of course nobody has ever even heard of a phase-locked-loop.

Re:No thanks

[Joce640k]

I find their optical interconnects give a much warmer bass sound and more detailed mids.

(Actually saw a reviewer say this in a HiFi magazine...)

Re:No thanks

[dgatwood]

Compared to what? It might actually provide just that if you're comparing to an analog connection. If you're comparing to a different digital connection, then that's just silly.

Re:No thanks

[Stupendoussteve]

I've seen similar reviews comparing optical to coax S/PDIF, and even gold-plated optical cables vs regular ones.

Will wonders never cease

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

This is the first time I've ever seen it said on Slashdot that Apple's price on something is justified.

Re:Will wonders never cease

[Xemu]

This is the first time I've ever seen it said on Slashdot that Apple's price on something is justified.

Their marketing department has learned about this site, it appears.

Re:Will wonders never cease

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea how high this site in the priorities of iTurfers and how good they get paid for being successull here.

Do you think astroturfers pray to the choir? olololololol Theres no circlejerks in professional astroturfing,

Re:Will wonders never cease

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You have no idea how high this site in the priorities of iTurfers and how good they get paid for being successull here.

Oh? How much?

passive was too hard.

[cheeks5965]

my team did a lot of the ground research for the light peak spec. the greatest challenge was shoving enough bits through the wire -- we couldn't find a way to do it passively. That's why it's $50.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

but why the chips are not part of the devices?

Re:passive was too hard.

[advocate_one]

yes there was... put the chips in the card at each end... or even, deity forbid... dump the electrical wire except just for power and ground and use a fibre optic link for the data... it's NOT rocket science these days...

Re:passive was too hard.

[toQDuj]

The chips are tuned *per cable* as far as I heard, and thus cannot be included on-board. They would've if they could've.
regarding the fibreoptics, the cost was much higher than for copper. Not rocket science, but not exactly consumer-price either.

Re:passive was too hard.

[yuhong]

Yea, I think it is known that optical cables was considered in the development of Light Peak, and ultimately Light Peak/Thunderbolt should work with both copper and optical cabling.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about just doing 10-gig Ethernet? 10 gigabit bandwidth over at least 50m of CAT 5!

Re:passive was too hard.

[shmlco]

Even a different LENGTH of cable would have different performance characteristics. This allows different lengths and even materials to be used. With the right chips on board, you could, potentially, plug a fibre Thunderbolt cable into a wire-based computer or peripheral.

Re:passive was too hard.

[EdZ]

If so, then put your expensive chips at each connector, and put a single cheap memory ship in the cable. Perform whatever tuning is required, then store the coefficients on the memory. When you plug in the cable, the memory is interrogated and the coefficients sent to the fancy chips at either end.
Of course, this assumes that actual chip cost is a factor, rather than just a massive markup because of a pair of chips costing tens of pennies each.

Re:passive was too hard.

[itsdapead]

Because different cables can use different chips or firmware. The initial Intel release said that optical cables might be available in the future - same (electrical) sockets, but with an optical transciever built into each plug.

Also, Thunderbolt is not a USB replacement for attaching mice and cheap memory sticks - its an external PCIe bus and its killer apps will be things that you can't do with USB. Hence the first peripherals are things like kick-ass RAID arrays, fast SSDs, high end video capture/editing kit etc. One of the forthcoming peripherals is an external case to take a full-size PCIe card (try that with USB!)

So, lots of MacBook users are not going to use TB as anything other than a monitor port, so it makes sense to shift some of the component costs to the cable rather than the motherboard.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

$50 is still too much for two chips and some wire.

Re:passive was too hard.

[toQDuj]

My guess the bulk of the cost are in assembly of a low volume product, packaging and sales overhead. I think they make perhaps 50-75% profit on each cable. That said, why is everyone focusing on the cost of the cable? it is not the first high-end cable to sell for 50 dollars..

Re:passive was too hard.

[toQDuj]

I suspect the communications overhead for thunderbolt is considerably lower resulting in a higher throughput.

Re:passive was too hard.

[AbRASiON]

If that's whats needed and how tight the tolerances are, then it seems to me, thunderbolt is defective by design.

But I think it's defective by design for several other reasons too.

Re:passive was too hard.

[toQDuj]

Well, as they say in the linux help forums: If you can think of a better way to do it, feel free to make and implement your own.. I am of the opinion that thunderbolt has potential and will wait a while before making opinions. I also think that there are a slew of engineers who have worked on this, and it seems to me a bit insulting to them to hear people here go "why did you not just do A or B". Do you really think they did not think of this thing you just thought up in 5 minutes? The hubris of the unwashed masses..

Re:passive was too hard.

[scubamage]

my team did a lot of the ground research for the light peak spec. the greatest challenge was shoving enough bits through the wire -- we couldn't find a way to do it passively. That's why it's $50.

You're one of the engineers behind it? You and your team did some good work, its a cool idea. Kudos.

Re:passive was too hard.

[scubamage]

Parallel printer cables still sell for 30$ at best buy last time I checked. (Just checked, yup, they still do)

Re:passive was too hard.

[scubamage]

I wouldn't consider it defective if its a known design decision. It allows for tweaking as necessary to perform better for a given application as opposed to trying to fit 1000 different applications against a single implementation. It gives creators of peripherals a bit more flexibility. I understand your point though. I just think it allows for some extra flexibility and modularity for whoever plans to release things using it.

Re:passive was too hard.

[inglorion_on_the_net]

How about just doing 10-gig Ethernet?

That was my first thought, too, but then, the hardware to support 10Gb Ethernet currently costs quite a lot more than $50.

USB 3.0, on the other hand, has gotten quite affordable, and there are lots of USB 3.0 devices already on the market. Of course, it's 4Gb, not 10Gb.

Re:passive was too hard.

[drinkypoo]

Difference is that a $1 printer cable works just as well (over short distances!) as a $30 printer cable. For a 6' cable it is literally irrelevant. This already becomes untrue when you get to USB, where many of the cheapest cables won't work for USB2 (especially the retractable ones) or won't work reliably.

Re:passive was too hard.

[scubamage]

I agree wholeheartedly, and as someone involved with technology you know that. However, remember that the majority of the market out there doesn't even know that you can get a 1$ cable off of pricewatch that works just as well :) Until they do, I think the prices will remain artificially high.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Eventually it would be cheaper just to do it the way it is now. Your suggestion sounded reasonable but it doubled the part count.

$50 is really isn't that bad for a specialty cable that has a small market atm. It will go down as soon as third-party cables become available.

Try buying a cable with hermetic connectors on them. They don't have fancy electronics and they aren't cheap either. My point being don't complain about the cost of the very first cable that connects a light peak device to an apple computer. This what we call bleeding edge prices. It will do down as soon as the market gets more than a week old.

Re:passive was too hard.

[DigiShaman]

With as much power as GPUs can consume, nVidia might attempt to create a separate Tesla breakout box for standard workstation use.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Amouth]

i look at the cable and the connectors and i just have this feeling of SFPs/Mini-GBIC but for PCIe instead of FC/Ethernet

and with that in mind 50$ is cheap for a full cable - and potential is great if vendors start to embrace it.

i know alot of people point at Firewire.. personally my problem with it was it's daisy chain - it wanted to be simplified scsi but for the price you could just use scsi.

Re:passive was too hard.

[blueg3]

Unfortunately, power isn't nearly as big a limitation for GPGPU as the bandwidth between main memory and the graphics card. Thunderbolt is currently only what, about 10 Gbit/s? That's well below an 8- or 16-lane PCIE card.

(I could see for some applications, you could shove enough Teslas into a box to worry about the power, but have an application that didn't bottleneck on bandwidth.)

Re:passive was too hard.

[jedidiah]

They already sell Tesla workstations for that. No need to use some external bus cable and a card box.

Something like this is stuck between the "it's not really mobile" problem and the "certain stuff doesn't need to be mobile" problem.

It's a solution to a problem that really shouldn't exist in the first place.

Re:passive was too hard.

[TheRaven64]

$50 is the Apple price. They charge $20 for a passive DVI to VGA adaptor. If Apple sells them for $50, other manufacturers will probably sell them for $10, dropping to $5 if the volumes increase.

The only reason that anyone cares about Apple's cable is that they were the first to market.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Belial6]

Also consider, that with TB, you won't have a dozen of them hanging off the back of your computer. If I went to a standard big box store and bought the cables to replace all of the USB cables connected to my desktop, I would likely spend more than $50.

Re:passive was too hard.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Your suggestion sounded reasonable but it doubled the part count.

I assumed he was integrating the calibration into the PHY and only replacing the calibrating chip with a memory chip in the cable - should be a cheaper part. Ought to be in Version 2 of the spec, I'd imagine.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Agripa]

It is not that simple. The problem is that the impedance discontinuities of the connectors at either end of the cable are a significant problem at the signalling rates needed for 10 Gb/s full duplex so at least for a consumer product, it may have been cheaper to use an active cable rather than a passive one.

DisplayPort and HyperTransport manage it but both either use more conductors or are not full duplex.

Re:passive was too hard.

[advocate_one]

when you're up in the RADAR frequencies... it would make FAR more sense to go for the optical link... just for sheer reliability of signalling... but, this is a commercial product and the PHBs and bean counters have decided for the cheapest solution and to make the customer suffer...

but what do I know... I'm just a RADAR engineer (Electronic Warfare speciality) who got into the software design side of it doing systems analysis. I've always strived for 100% reliability as people's lives were on the line.

Re:passive was too hard.

[Agripa]

Since the physical transceivers are part of the cable they could always release an optical version of the cable later which presumably would have longer range. I assume they did not because it would have been more expensive at this time and 2 meters was enough for consumer applications.

A passive optical link would have precluded Mini DisplayPort compatibility. As it is now, the same connector is doing double duty. Compatibility also prevents just doubling the number of signal pairs so a passive cable could have been used.

I suspect they could have done the cable equalization on the computer and enclosure side but the power requirements would have been too high for portable systems. 10GBASE-T is not known for low power yet.

Re:passive was too hard.

[EETech1]

I'd be willing to bet the variability in the connections and connecting devices would cause issues with that arrangement. Each connecting device would have to have very consistent input characteristics or have its own tuning data to throw in the mix.

This way they know when the cable leaves the factory that the signals make it properly from end to end. This is a much better bet for trouble free communications over a variety of devices IMHO.

The calibration parameters are likely burned into an array of fuses that slew its impedance and other properties, and these are adjusted by the calibratior by burning the fuse, and this is typically a one time deal. Run the cable, see how the signals look, tweak it into spec (or dead on for more expensive cables) run it again to confirm it meets the manufacturing requirements (repeat again if required for more expensive cables). Like a resistor network in a digital potentiometer only burned by the programmer.

Active tuning would require much more expensive active transceivers, and I think the memory chips, and required interfaces would cost the same or more than the two active interface chips.

It's just one more thing consisting of many complicated things (impedance matching!) that has to happen in order for a device to work. Imagine the support nightmare that becomes if you don't even know if the system is even capable of properly and reliably transmitting bits! Do you see the cable and receiver tuning parameters upon connecting the device when you debug the driver output in the logs???
Yuck!

Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strategy

[antifoidulus]

well, at least part of it anyway. With the departure of the XServe from Apple's lineup and their promotion of the mac mini server, it's obvious Apple is really trying to go for the small-medium business market with their server offerings. As part of that, Apple has been trying to convince owners/IT people who work at said businesses that you can essentially create the same "infrastructure"(hardware/software/workflows etc) as the big enterprises do without having to spring for enterprise level hardware. Even with the cable, this RAID is still cheaper than a fiber channel card, and of course actually allows people to connect real storage to the mini-server(provided they throw a thunderbolt port in the next mini, which they would have be insane not too).

While I certainly don't see anything that requires a $50 cable to totally usurp USB anytime soon, that doesn't mean it won't be successful or fit in well with the type of product lineup Apple is trying to build.

Reason?

[HaeMaker]

So what is the technical reason for putting the logic into the cable? None? Purely financial? Ok, I will wait for IBM's new 50GB/s interconnect.

Re:Reason?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe try reading the article, n00bf4g?

Re:Reason?

[fermion]

Here is the teardown. The claim is that significant circuitry is required to insure that the data transmission remains fast and reliable. It sounds like a kludge to provide a cheaper copper connection rather than paying for fiber inputs and outputs in peripheral and host devices.

We will see how this works. The Apple method has been to provide a reliable and high speed external bus so users could hook anything up essentially plug and play. This was back to the SCSI days. Those cable were more reliable than these. Though the move to USB certainly reduced costs, it was not as elegant as the FIrewire. It will be a while for current users to upgrade to thunderbolt. Hopefully by that time we will see other manufacturers.

Re:Reason?

[Amouth]

Even if they where using fiber - i would rather them do it this way with the fiber transceiver in the cable than to have the lasers and receivers built into the controller in the laptop - SFP's go bad this is why they are easy to replace in enterprise environments..

Re:That's weird!

[d4fseeker]

They are talking about Light Peak connection, not a phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

Or are you just trying to be funny?

Point?

[airconswitch]

At this point, a 10 Gb/s peripheral is excessive -- not even SATA-6 can do that. Granted, Thunderbolt could be used internally, but can flash even get those speeds? Hard disks sure can't.

Re:Point?

[toQDuj]

This way you can daisy-chain a couple of devices without losing speed.

Re:Point?

[yuhong]

The big benefit is standard PCIe chips can be adapted by adding a Thunderbolt controller.

Re:Point?

[TheRaven64]

Think about docking station replacements. Thunderbolt is fast enough that you can put a GigE, eSATA and USB controllers in a monitor, plug a keyboard, mouse, and disk into it and be able to access all of them from your laptop with a single cable. This was the big advantage of FireWire 800 too. I could only just saturate USB2 with an external disk, but with FireWire 800 I could connect two to my laptop with a single cable. This was great when I was doing video editing - one drive for the raw footage, one for the scratch renders, so I was almost always doing linear reads on one, linear writes on the other, with little seeking.

Re:Point?

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

At this point, a 10 Gb/s peripheral is excessive -- not even SATA-6 can do that. Granted, Thunderbolt could be used internally, but can flash even get those speeds? Hard disks sure can't.

So your point is: "It won't catch on because it's too fast."

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[antifoidulus]

Ugh, the spelling nazi in me won't let me go on with life if I don't self-flagellate, it's "insane not to", not "insane not too"...

Sony Viao Z-series

[sr180]

The Sony Viao Z-series laptops have just been announced and include a light-peak connected dock. Its only a couple of weeks away - so Apple wont be the only one with Thunderbolt.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you cannot connect Toshiba's optical Thunderbolt to any of the non-optical Thunderbolt peripherals out there. Thunderbolt is a stupid and useless interface for anything but very specialized markets.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[arth1]

But it's non-standard, and requires a Sony proprietary cable, which only comes with their Sony proprietary dock, and can't be used for anything else.
Which is why Sony calls it "Light Peak based".

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[serviscope_minor]

Sounds like how Sony knobbled firewire with their wretched iLink. They insisted on a 4 pin connector with no power. Almost all laptops with firefire came with the 4 pin connector which while cheaper was less robust and made devices either use external power or a USB plug. Shame that 6 pin firewire never really caught on in laptops since it's rated up to 30W.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[gabebear]

There isn't an optical Lightpeak/Thunderbolt yet. Sony(not Toshiba) is sticking a copper Thunderolt in the USB port instead of the Displayport.

Thunderbolt uses the same protocol and similar speeds to PCIe, which should make external video cards and other IO adapters pretty easy.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[dafing]

I'll forever curse Sony for that damn thing, I remember my first iPod, Firewire only, as a Windows user I was a second class citizen on my laptop, an iLink port on the front, I needed to use the provided 4 to 6 Pin *Firewire* adapter to connect the iPod :-)

All in an attempt to save a buck or two on the Windows PC end...its shameful. Damn them to hell for frigging up such a wonderful standard...

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[Hieronymus Howard]

Which is why I don't buy Sony products.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[NJRoadfan]

Apple didn't make matters any better. The name "i.Link" came about because Sony didn't want to pay licensing for the Firewire name and logo. Everyone else just called it 1394.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[perryizgr8]

i dunno man. you could also blame apple for not using usb. in fact you could also blame yourself for buying a shitty mp3 player.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[TheRaven64]

Shame that 6 pin firewire never really caught on in laptops since it's rated up to 30W

I seem to recall that it was rated up to 45W. The problem was that the spec said that any device could provide or consume up to 45W over the wire. This meant that you could never rely on the power actually being there. My first laptop with a FireWire port had a 65W power supply - there was no way that it would have been able to supply 45W to even one of the two FireWire ports. I have two external FireWire disks, and they both require their own power supplies, even in FireWire 800 mode, because laptops simply didn't provide enough power.

It would have been better if they'd said 10W. That would be enough to power an external drive or two, but low enough that a laptop could actually provide it.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite true. The Sony Viao Z employs Light Peak, but they don't use the same connectors as Apple, and they aren't running dual links. So it isn't Thunderbolt-compatible.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[Stupendoussteve]

Light Peak as a name no longer exists. Intel owns the Thunderbolt name, not Apple. Light Peak was the code name for Thunderbolt.

Re:Sony Viao Z-series

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

i dunno man. you could also blame apple for not using usb. in fact you could also blame yourself for buying a shitty mp3 player.

USB2 wasn't available back then.

Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[tftp]

The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence.

Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel. Will you make a FireWire mouse? Probably not; you can hoist a cow on a standard FireWire cable. But once you have a USB mouse, why to get Firewire? Note that speedy peripherals were uncommon back then, except video cameras. And USB 3.x attacked that market; I have one USB 3.0 device here, an HDD, and it is backward compatible to USB 2.x.

However 2 x 10 Gbps is some good increase in speed. You don't need it for 99% of peripherals on the market; but when you need it you need it - like that RAID thingy which can generate and consume that much data. Your choices there are simple - either this Thunderbolt, which is more or less fixed, or a variety of 10 Gbps connections, copper or fiber, SFP+ or XFP or whatever. They all are very much different, locking you into some specific hardware, and they all run hot - bad news in a notebook.

10GBASE-T is one of competitors; it runs on slower clock and requires more pairs. But as long as it works, who cares? The twisted pair cable, even category 6A, is cheap, and the distance up to 100m is what you want in any reasonable setup that includes more than two boxes on top of each other. 10G Ethernet is also switchable and routable. Considering that Thunderbolt is a point to point transport for DisplayPort and PciE, it's use is probably limited to expansion ports; but it's probably pretty good in that role - even if majority of computers can't even handle the bandwidth, let alone have a need for such a thing.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[pathological liar]

but when you need it you need it

But do you really need it? 10Gb/s is pretty great and all, but... so's SATA3. 6Gb/s is 750MB/s, Seagate's 2TB SATA3 drives do ~130MB/s sustained in the benchmarks I found, so the R4 array in the article can only max it out for the first second or so while it's still reading from the drive caches. The R6 would be bottlenecked by SATA3, but *barely* (780 vs. 750) Cheaper cables too :P ... sure you could put SSDs in it and get a benefit, but that's a pretty niche market.

I think what's more likely is that by the time there's enough hardware, and enough desire, for Thunderbolt... there'll be a SATA4 or something.

Of course, what do I know?

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[tftp]

But do you really need it?

It beats SATA because it is not locked into ATA command set. Thunderbolt routes PCIe I/O, which means you can build any PCI peripheral and it will work as if you plugged it into the main board. You can have access to the RAM, use interrupts, DMA and whatever. There are many I/O devices out there that generate lots of data, and they are not disks. Medical sensors, scientific equipment, software-defined radios, high resolution / high frame rate cameras (for security and for machine vision,) external video cards and GPU... I can think of many examples.

Another item of interest is the DisplayPort channel. SATA doesn't support it, Thunderbolt does. Sure, you can always have a second cable... but why to use two when one works fine? The need for remote display devices is quite obvious, and one Thunderbolt jack can replace DP and SATA ports - something that a small device will appreciate.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[hitmark]

Sounds like a security nightmare...

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[squizzar]

4kx2kx20bppx60Hz video is around 10GB/s, which normally means a plugin PCIE card for most systems. There are systems out there that do that now - we make cards that do quad 1080p60 uncompressed over PCIE. If you have a suitable external interface like Thunderbolt you have a lot more options (especially with the PCIE transport - there are plenty of existing designs that could be put in a box at the end of a cable rather than a card in the PC).

There's more than just consumer electronics and hard disk drives out there. Build an array of SSDs that can sustain the read rates, or deal with multiple uncompressed video sources (that don't have any kind of flow control, either deal with the data or break) and suddenly you can watch Gb/s of bandwidth vanish in no time.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[Kjella]

Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel.

Firewire had one thing going for it, the stability requirement for capturing DV tapes. Even with that I had to shut down most everything else to avoid framedrops. As soon as memory/HDD based cameras took over, I have no problem transfering 1080p full hd video over USB 2.0 - simply because now the USB controller can say "hey, sorry I dozed for a moment, could you send that again" unlike tape where you'd have to stop, rewind and replay to do that.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[Anonymous Coward]

How is security enforced in this system? Does a malicious peripheral have access to the entire machine, or is the CPU still in control? (Serious question; I genuinely don't know but assume traditional PCIe cards have privileged access to memory in a way you probably wouldn't want (say) a printer or usb stick to have.)

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[drinkypoo]

Firewire had one thing going for it, the stability requirement for capturing DV tapes.

It had two things going for it, because it also involves dramatically less CPU overhead. Two things, HA HA HA! In fact, it had three things going for it, because the connectors are both better than any USB but Micro-USB which is only now catching on. That's three things better than USB, HA HA HA! USB is poop.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[drinkypoo]

It beats SATA because it is not locked into ATA command set. Thunderbolt routes PCIe I/O, which means you can build any PCI peripheral and it will work as if you plugged it into the main board. You can have access to the RAM, use interrupts, DMA and whatever.

Is there actually any reason you couldn't do PCIE over SATA? Last I checked storage devices did DMA too.

Sure, you can always have a second cable... but why to use two when one works fine?

To save money. Cables without fancy chips in them can be had very cheaply these days if you order them.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[spheric_harlot]

So. My studio is not high-end, but I have eight hard drives, an external monitor, and two audio interfaces connected to the ProBook. On the road, I use external bus-powered drives and bus-powered Firewire or USB interfaces. Explain to me how any S-ATA-based tech would make my life easier and scale five to ten years into the future.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[Kjella]

It had two things going for it, because it also involves dramatically less CPU overhead.

For the price difference you could buy a faster CPU which makes the point entirely moot. I guess it was nice if you were working a lot against an external disk, but really work should be against an internal disk and just stored externally (unless you've got at least eSATA connectors, but those didn't exist at the time)

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[TBBle]

Wikipedia says it's up to the IOMMU to enforce this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)#Security

The only other discussion Google turned up was either http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2011/02/thunderbolt-introducing-new-way-to-hack.html or people republishing, reprinting or rephrasing that post.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[MachineShedFred]

Of course, what do I know?

Clearly, not much; at least when it comes to this topic. Can you plug a Fiber channel interface into SATA3 for access to a hundred TB SAN? How about a PCI Express card or Gigabit Ethernet?

This is a full expansion bus, not just for storage.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, I'm not here to do your homework for you. Or did you have a specific objection? Or are you just an astroturfer?

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[drcagn]

Sorry, I'm not here to do your homework for you. Or did you have a specific objection? Or are you just an astroturfer?

It's not "his homework" to make your argument for you.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[Agripa]

It beats SATA because it is not locked into ATA command set. Thunderbolt routes PCIe I/O, which means you can build any PCI peripheral and it will work as if you plugged it into the main board.

So at best you have traded using a somewhat standardized SATA AHCI driver for the same driver you would be using for any other custom disk or RAID controller unless of course the disk enclosure includes a SATA AHCI controller putting you right back where you started. Plus the cable is available externally for hot-unplug tests which are made even easier since the connector lacks positive retention. It's also 25% faster than the PCI Express 1.0 x8 link which my several years old internal RAID card uses. What a deal!

To be fair however, it is a great solution for adding external storage to a sealed laptop used as a desktop replacement if money is no object.

Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt

[tftp]

There are plenty of comments in the thread that mention devices other than storage. The ATA command set is designed primarily for storage. It is probably "complete enough" to connect a custom video chipset through it, but you need to rewrite all the drivers. Thunderbolt will allow you to just plug the card, or two, or three as you need them. You can build a pretty impressive video machine with that if you want to. Apple always went for extra features - they need to justify the price, after all.

So don't focus on storage - there are indeed lots of solutions for storage already, the NAS being the cheapest and probably sufficient for majority of the users. Think of *what else* you can do with a notebook if suddenly you can insert additional PCIe cards into it, and the bus bandwidth is not a concern. You think connecting several powerful GPUs to your notebook is not important? That gives you plenty of performance. If you are a videographer you can run a lot of filters on full resolution, uncompressed video this way, or do whatever else you need. If you are a business you can now develop and sell external PCIe devices that connect to the host via the Thunderbolt interface.

Doomed to fail?

[falconcy]

Is this going to be yet another of those technologies like Firewire which will end up being a toy for Mac Fanboys and ignored by the majority of the userbase?

Re:Doomed to fail?

[hitmark]

And given a big buzz thanks to Mac fanboys being media involved. Seriously, how else did the update of Final Cut Pro end up on prime time tv?

Re:Doomed to fail?

[itsdapead]

Is this going to be yet another of those technologies like Firewire which will end up being a toy for Mac Fanboys

...would this be the "toy" which became the standard interface for a generation of DV camcorders and decks? It wasn't too shabby for hooking up external hard drives until USB3 came along.

Re:Doomed to fail?

[dafing]

Wait, theres a USB3? Whens it out? ;-)

I'd be hugely happy if this thing killed USB for good, Firewire was always vastly superior, USB was the bastard spawn for little clickers and printers, Firewire ran data transfer, high end video...it couldnt be beat!

Oh, except on price, which would have come down with scale, what have you...

Call it "Light Peak" too :-)

Re:Doomed to fail?

[MachineShedFred]

Anyone working in digital video for the last decade would disagree that FireWire was something ignored, as it was the only way to ingest video from a DV camera until USB caught up years later.

Re:Doomed to fail?

[m50d]

It wasn't too shabby for hooking up external hard drives until USB3 came along.

Yes it was. If you're taking an external hard drive it's usually so you can connect it to someone else's computer. With USB that'll work for any machine from the past fifteen years, whereas with firewire you really couldn't count on it. And it's not like external hard drives are fast enough to hit the 60mb/s USB2 limit anyways. I had a dual-connector drive, and after the first couple of months I threw out the firewire cable.

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd better not read fermion's comment below, then, where he confuses 'insure' and 'ensure'...

$50 is nothing :-)

[giorgist]

$50 is nothing :-)

I buddy of mine was happy to get a discount on a $199 HDMI cable and pay only $99 :-)

The fact that I bought mine at $2 is not relevant me thinks :-)

Lame.

[SvnLyrBrto]

The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence.

Preach on brother... you tell 'em. I also heard that Thunderbolt has no wireless and less space than a Nomad. No doubt that makes it doubly lame and triply doomed to obsolescence.

Re:Reason? It's Smart

[nonsequitor]

Putting the transceivers in the cable itself could mean that upgrading the bandwidth is as simple as getting a better cable and upgrading the thunderbolt driver.

We need to dump the current common paradigm

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

"We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace the notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job."

Replace Apple with any given entity and Microsoft with any entity that leads in it's field.

WebOS probably won't ever beat android, iOS or even windows phone 7. Does it have to? No.

Same is true for thunderbolt. Does it have to beat USB, FireWire, etc? No. Thunderbolt devices just have to hit the market.

Thunderbolt can support USB 3 hosts. I just can't wait for thunderbolt to completely replace all of the other cables except power that connect to my laptop.

Re:We need to dump the current common paradigm

[Tumbleweed]

I just can't wait for thunderbolt to completely replace all of the other cables except power that connect to my laptop.

I think it'll be more likely that a wireless connection will do that for most people before Thunderbolt will, just as DVD will be replaced by streaming video rather than Blu-Ray.

Re:We need to dump the current common paradigm

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Difference is that a thunderbolt to USB hub is likely now.

I run a very recent MBPro with thunderbolt. I hope this day comes soon.

Re:We need to dump the current common paradigm

[Anonymous Coward]

I just can't wait for thunderbolt to completely replace all of the other cables except power that connect to my laptop.

Too bad Thunderbolt doesn't provide a lot of power, so you'd have to power some of the devices separately.

Re:We need to dump the current common paradigm

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it was one of apples former CEO who put it best when he said something like Dell ships thousand more desktops then us. Are we worried no. it's like saying Honda sells thousands of more cars then Mercedes and then saying that Mercedes will go bankrupt.

Re:We need to dump the current common paradigm

[TheRaven64]

That's why they run the display signal through it too. The logical place for the ThunderBolt to other stuff adaptor is in the monitor. Apple's older displays had FireWire and USB hubs built in, but you needed to connect three cables to your laptop for them all to work. The even older ones used ADC, which included USB in the same cable, but with a connector that was too large for a laptop. With ThunderBolt, you just plug a monitor in to your laptop, and then use the eSATA and USB controllers in the monitor.

Re:We need to dump the current common paradigm

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Or you could have a wall wart.

The point's kind of to have a pseudo docking station. I'd be OK with a wallwart.

Doomed to succeed!

[Anonymous Coward]

The people saying Thunderbolt will fail clearly haven't understood what Thunderbolt is all about. It's about locking in Apple's clients. By equipping their iToys with Thunderbolt ports and noithing else, Apple can control who gets to manufacture and sell accessories (Intel is the only manufacturer, the specs are murky, and Apple has an exclusive deal for the near future).

Forget about buying a 3rd party keyboard or camera adapter for your iPhone or iPad. You'll either pay 3x more than Android / PC users for an Apple-branded one, or you'll pay 2.5x more for one made by some brand that accepted giving Apple 50% of their profits. And the usual iDiots will pay and smile and say "it's more expensive and does the same as USB3 (minus the backwards compatibility, of course), but it's got more chips in it, so it's okay. Thank you, Apple, for allowing me to buy a more valuable cable and more valuable accessories than everyone else.".

Apple Thunderbolt: Because keeping 30% of the price of every 3rd party app just wasn't enough.

like the fella said

[callmebill]

Standards are like toothbrushes: everyone agrees you should have one, but no one wants to use yours.

Re:like the fella said

[killfixx]

I wish I had the mod points! That made me laugh! Thanks!

I'm pretty sure they know...

[Anonymous Coward]

NBC's backend is all supplied by Sony, IIRC, and runs a mix of ethernet and HD-SDI.

And right now (with the joke that is FCPX - can't load any existing FCP projects,can't export to or capture from tape with timecode, can't output video to broadcast monitors, etc.) Apple isn't exactly very popular in the broadcast industry.

Oh, and yes, broadcast studios are obviously a niche market. If that's not obvious to you, then you probably don't know what "niche" means.

Re:Not the cable but the drives

[Wyatt Earp]

iPhones had come out every 12 months, now it's going to be about 15-16 between iPhone 4 and it's replacement.

no thanks, eSATA is the way

[orange47]

I like eSATA much much more. After all, the drives are SATA already. anything else will just bring in more latency.

also price is important, and what most people use. for the same reasons, I dislike firewire, scsi, sas..

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[Anonymous Coward]

eSATA is too slow for many applications, An external RAID array, for example - you dont want to be limited to the bandwidth of a single SATA channel when each of the drives in the array has their own. A thunderbolt attached controller can split out into MANY full speed SATA channels.

Think of Thunderbolt as ePCI-x.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[orange47]

well, in that case, I would hope new PCs will have more eSATA connectors. also there is an option to simply turn internal connectors to eSATA with a simple, *cheap* cable and bracket.
for me as an ordinary, mortal, consumer SATA3 and even SATA2 speeds are more than enough.

'mighty' Apple can run whatever they want in "themCloud in themWorld"..
oh, and another PCI standard is just what I don't want. it seems to me they are doing it to force us buying new cards and stuff.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[MachineShedFred]

Please plug a 600TB SAN into your eSATA port. We'll wait.

Oh, you can't do that? I can with Thunderbolt and one of these Fiber Channel adapters.

Now I think I'll chain that off of one of these PCI-e breakout boxes so that I can also have a full blown desktop video card on my ultraportable notebook. We'll wait again while you plug a Radeon 6870 into your eSATA.

Thunderbolt is not for storage only.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[orange47]

WD is bundling newer sata controller with 3tb drives, presumably its 64bit or something.
I would hope that with 4kb blocks, limit for older SATA is 16Tb, once they drop 512byte emulation.

I already have port for radeon gfx.
you do as you like, but I am not gonna waste money on that thunderbolt thingy.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[jedidiah]

> Please plug a 600TB SAN into your eSATA port. We'll wait.

I could do 24TB with the array hardware I have right now.

> so that I can also have a full blown desktop video card on my ultraportable notebook

Then it won't be portable anymore.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[TheRaven64]

That makes about as much sense as saying that you prefer PS/2 to USB. After all, mice and keyboards already support PS/2. Anything else will just bring in more latency. Actually, it makes even less sense than that, because ThunderBolt is lower latency than eSATA, while USB actually did add more latency.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[MachineShedFred]

24 != 600

And no, it won't be portable when you have that plugged in, but you don't need to take it with you when you want to be mobile. That's the point of external connectivity.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[MachineShedFred]

That's great that you can have your own storage array. Now go to a video edit house where they need to have people hooked up to shared storage, and tons of it.

Everyone having their own local 16TB arrays is a huge clusterfuck if you have a real workflow. Shared storage, with a digital asset management system is the way real people do that work if they're serious.

You can't do that with SATA without having some form of networking stack, and gigabit ethernet is slower than 4 gig fiber channel; to say nothing of being able to read / write to 80 disk spindles at once on a SAN from a laptop. Good luck doing that from SATA by itself. Yes, you could have a file server out there with a crapton of disk on it, but now you've got the overhead of TCP/IP and whatever file sharing protocol you're using, as well as the server OS.

Please realize that Thunderbolt is not a replacement for USB / FireWire / SATA / etc., just the same as PCI Express isn't a replacement for those connections. It's two fundamentally different technologies, meant for wildly different scopes of connectivity.

Re:no thanks, eSATA is the way

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

well, in that case, I would hope new PCs will have more eSATA connectors. also there is an option to simply turn internal connectors to eSATA with a simple, *cheap* cable and bracket.

So you actually want to hook up your RAID with a bunch of eSATA cables, one for each drive?

Don't forget it's also the video feed

[SuperKendall]

At this point, a 10 Gb/s peripheral is excessive -- not even SATA-6 can do that.

The device can also be dong video over that same cable as well, so it's not as excessive as it first seems. And isn't it better to have a standard with a little breathing room for devices to grow into?

Re:Don't forget it's also the video feed

[bucky0]

Well, also, the video channel is separate from the data channel (there's 20gbit/sec aggregate bandwidth)

Re:Don't forget it's also the video feed

[Farmer Tim]

The device can also be dong video...

You're the last person I expected an "Apple is teh gay" joke from.

Common sense

[AliasMarlowe]

That's crazy talk. This is Slashdot. Where anything remotely related to Apple or Microsoft must be met with derision! There's no need to bring logic or common sense into the discussion!

Um, but logic and common sense both demand that we heap derision upon Apple and Microsoft (and Adobe and Oracle and Sony and RIAA/MPAA and patent trolls and any other manifestations of evil that crop up).

The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[SuperKendall]

And what was wrong with fiber-optic or the, hell, IDK, over 9000 other connection standards that have already been developed, real-world-tested and debugged, and have cheap, easily produced components?

Because they didn't exist.

None of them were as performant or cheap.

Also, Thunderbolt CAN use fiber-optic, currently the $50 cable is cheaper than a fiber optic cable would be and probably much less fragile.

People who are criticizing the move to Thunderbolt have a lot of that "3GB/s is enough for anyone" vibe about them, and in addition ignore the benefits of the truly direct connection into the computer this standard gives you...

Re:The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[m50d]

People who are criticizing the move to Thunderbolt have a lot of that "3GB/s is enough for anyone" vibe about them, and in addition ignore the benefits of the truly direct connection into the computer this standard gives you...

Five years ago when I was saying firewire wasn't worth it I heard much the same. Again, it was faster than the then-latest USB and gave a more direct connection into the computer. What's different this time around?

Re:The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[jedidiah]

> People who are criticizing the move to Thunderbolt have a lot of that "3GB/s is enough for anyone" vibe about them

It is. Or rather it's really quite difficult to saturate such a connection. In order to do so, you have to be willing to spend quite a lot of money. By that point, you are FAR out of the league of some "pro-sumer" device.

Perhaps this is a cable for 2021. Apple likes to pull stunts like that: push it's users into tech that's not fully baked yet.

Re:The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[SuperKendall]

Five years ago when I was saying firewire wasn't worth it I heard much the same. Again, it was faster than the then-latest USB and gave a more direct connection into the computer. What's different this time around?

I'm not sure what you are saying here, because firewire WAS worth it then, I've been sung firewire for five years and it's been far superior to most technologies for most of that time. Just chaining abilities alone was SO MUCH better than USB...

So basically, beck then you could get a much superior technology for just a little more - and the same is true now. It really helps future-proof your purchases when the technology you buy into is built to last instead of just a slight bump on the old technology, like USB 3.0.

I'm using USB 3.0 myself today, it's OK but it does nothing eSATA could not ALREADY do. Thunderbolt is far more advanced and can keep up as storage switches over to larger and larger SSD drives with far greater throughput.

Re:The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[macs4all]

Apple likes to pull stunts like that: push it's users into tech that's not fully baked yet.

Like what? Honestly, Apple usually gets criticized 'round here for being BEHIND the curve on tech. Now you're saying that they are too far AHEAD of the curve?!?

Also, I really can't think of any technology that they have used that wasn't baked yet. Let's take a trip down memory lane (pun intended) :

SCSI. Fully baked.

RS-422. Already an IEEE standard.

ADB. They invented it. Worked perfectly from day one.

Ethernet. Certainly a mature standard by the time Macs had their first AAUI connector dongle.

Analog RGB video. Lots of weird connectors, and a pre I2C monitor identification system. But not really different under the hood.

NuBus. Primarily a TI creature. It was mature, but never caught on widely. This is the closest Apple came to adopting a standard "too early".

USB. Already a languishing standard that the iMac rescued from death.

FireWire. Joint effort of Apple and Sony. Became an important A/V standard. Still is.

IDE. Need I say more?

802.11b/g/n. Already standards ("n" being the exception. But everyone was in on that one).

DVI. Everyone uses it.

DisplayPort. Already a standard when Apple adopted it.

Open Firmware. A standard that the PeeSee makers resisted. But again, Apple didn't invent it; and it had some pretty heavy hitters behind it, too. Worked great from day one.

EFI. A standard that the PeeSee makers and Microsoft initially resisted. But again, Apple didn't invent it.

So, when, pray tell, is it acceptable to YOU to adopt a new technology?

Re:The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[m50d]

It really helps future-proof your purchases when the technology you buy into is built to last instead of just a slight bump on the old technology, like USB 3.0.

Only the one of my four computers has a firewire port, whereas all of them have USB. So I think USB is the more future-proof option.

Re:The problem was the unicorns wouldn't sell

[gordo3000]

the imac, with it's stunning popularity and market command was able to single-handedly rescue USB from what... dying out from irrelevance? I don't doubt with you are saying, that macs are hardly at the cutting edge of technology (or at least weren't, now they are right up there) but I don't think apple has every in it's long history had the market command to rescue or condemn any standard.

Still waiting for the magic box...

[hile]

What I would like to have with thunderbolt is fancy magic breaker box, which would for example include:
- 4 firewire 800 ports
- 8 USB2 / USB3 ports
- 2 ESATA ports for disks
- maybe connector for external display as well

Connecting such box to your laptop might sound silly for most users, but my use would be to hook this to my music hardware rack, having all of the audio hardware connected to your gig laptop with one cable. Like, all various MIDI controllers (usually USB), audio recording interfaces (usually firewire), instruments (my line6 guitar amp has USB) and external disks for recording.

Usually you only use one or two of these devices at a time, but the cables can be really a PITA: having one magic box bolted to your audio rack, connecting everything there permanently makes things so much simpler. Of course, I would like the magic box to come in 1U form factor, or with rack mounting kit.

If such box is made available, I seriously might be tempted to get a new MBP, just to be able to use it.

This is not going to make thunderbolt a must for all users, but it's wonderful technology to replace firewire (which is certainly not dead yet in pro audio market!). Everything doesn't have to be The Big Thing for everyone. I'm not sure about USB3, but I though it still has latency issues like USB2 for multichannel audio (like 32 channels, not your average gaming rig...), which are not solved by higher transfer rates. Might be wrong of course regarding USB3...

Re:Still waiting for the magic box...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I'm guessing Apple's next display will also be large hub/breaker-box -- a much better version of their current display designed for laptops.

Re:Still waiting for the magic box...

[blueg3]

You need to think more Apple. How about a large monitor that contains a high-performance video card and all of those ports -- perhaps at the base, so you don't have a rat's nest of wires coming from the monitor. Add a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and call it iDock.

Another alternative is to take the Time Capsule / wireless base station and add that brick of ports and a Thunderbolt connector.

It's still better

[dugeen]

Being ripped off by Steve Jobs is still better than being ripped off by Bill Gates because - er - I can't recall the exact reason but I'm sure the Applefan zombies will be along to explain it soon.

Re:It's still better

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for me it's better because of the twats that it obviously annoys : ).

(No need to thank me, I'm only glad that I could help)

Firewire Died?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought a FireWire RAID and I can pickup a FireWire hard drive just about anywhere. Except maybe WalMart.

What is important about the Sony implementation

[Shivetya]

is that they are using it in a way which I hope to see spread across the board.

I want my laptop to be light, relatively fast, and have long battery life. Yet at the same time I want some real storage, a dvd/blu burner, and really strong graphics abilities so if I want to game I don't feel as if I need a separate machine. The Sony docking station has its own graphics chipset which is much more powerful than the laptop's built in system. Not only does it provide the ability to game because of the external chipset you can also hook up three monitors to the laptop.

So the best of both worlds, fully portable light weight power and when at home depending on docking station you buy you could have a machine capable of gaming or doing real graphics work.

If this is how Thunderbolt plays out I am all for it. The one area Apple has seriously been lacking in laptops is docking stations.

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[DarkOx]

I don't buy it. You can still buy a Proliant server in a tower case for example. With that you can get an array of SAS disks, which will perform as well as anything you might strap to the thunderbolt cable, redundant power and no problems adding any other peripherals you might need, including a thunderbolt card down the road. Most of all its tidy in one box, that you can get for under $2k.

Or,

You could do with a Mini server and external storage. Sure it might perform as well for a little while but you have multiple boxes and separate failure prone power supplies. If you need any real storage capacity more than a couple TB or any real performance more than 3 drives or SSDs you are certain to pay more. Sounds like a mess to me. Find for the home market but I don't see an SMB using that. At least not the kind where people use more than just Google Docs, and the rest of the web. I am imagining SMB to mean a small company of maybe 8 to 20 people.

the need for speed

[Gravis Zero]

a reoccurring role in technology is "do we need or want it?" and the technologies that fail to fulfill such a role have found themselves left behind. price has a role but Apple has shown it's not a deal breaker to have crazy prices.

therefore, Intel must start convincing companies to make very highspeed Thunderbolt devices. there is only one consumer end device that needs that kind of bandwidth: graphics cards. nobody wants to lug around another device with their laptop so such a device would be one left at home for gaming. for Apple this is a problem because they dont have many games to start with and i really doubt they are just going to let any ol' person start making drivers because as we've seen with many third party graphics cards, drivers are buggy. this doesnt go well with Apple's "it just works" mantra.

on the other side of the fence, Microsoft doesnt care if a device bricks your computer and they are more than happy to take money from people willing to pay to get the Microsoft driver stamp of approval.
as mentioned in the article, Sony is putting Thunderbolt in their new Vaio Z laptop and their initial plan is for it to be used for external graphics cards.

this might be the graphics upgrade savior laptop gamers have been looking for but i'm skeptical.

Re:the need for speed

[jedidiah]

I dunno. It seems like if you are really that much of a dedicated gamer then you will either buy a proper laptop or buy a proper desktop. The idea of getting some half-*ssed solution and then augmenting it seems really absurd in the general PC market where you don't have to be trapped by a single vendor's choices. Any tech that has $50 cables is bound to be problematic for all by the must dedicated users.

I can well imagine how I might personally overwhelm the performance potential of thunderbolt. I can also imagine the price tag. Aint gonna happen any time soon.

PC users will probably just use "legacy" devices until thunderbolt seems compelling enough, assuming it ever reaches that point.

Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

An active cable that removes the need for fiber interconnects, and creates a prosumer-grade, thin, flexible cable? Very cool at twice the price.

Within a year, the manufacturers should be able to develop controls on the manufacturing process, and the active part will go away.

What Apple brought to market is a feasible, ultra-high-speed interconnect, which enables creation of heterogenous laptop / desktop hybrids, among other things.

And, next year's 50m active cable, using fiber instead of copper, will create a data-center friendly interconnect for e.g. SAN/NAS, clusters, ultra high-speed networks, etc.

Good for Intel and Apple.

Article missing key information

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT THE HELL IS THUNDERBOLT

Why is this on slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

What an idiotic article. Another fool generated article for linkbait.
The market will be flooded with Thunderbolt cables and devices shortly. Obviously.
Since when is Firewire obsolete?

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[jht]

It's a safe assumption that Thunderbolt will make it into everything Apple sells within the next month or so - in other words, adding the mini, MacBook Air, and Mac Pro. Those are the systems that are due refreshes and by all accounts are waiting in the wings for Lion to go GM.

Apple obviously was thinking ahead to Thunderbolt when they axed the Xserve, but as it stands they probably should have kept the Xserve around a few more months and tried to push either the Mac Pro or mini refresh ahead a couple of months in order to avoid a lot of the flak they took over the Xserve. The kind of folks who bought Xserves would have been a lot less pissed off - and though Apple doesn't explicitly cater to the server crowd, they're still good folks to have on your side.

USB 2 will remain the standard for lower-speed devices, printers, scanners, and casual storage (flash drives, pocket drives, etc.). Thunderbolt will likely compete well with USB 3.0 and also take the role of ExpressCard, FireWire, eSATA, and proprietary expansion docks for laptops.

Any vulnerabilities in there?

[grizdog]

These cables look relatively safe, but if the trend continues, how long before a virus exploits a vulnerability in the cable? The cyberwarfare guys might be working on that one right now.

Re:Any vulnerabilities in there?

[blueg3]

Not very useful without persistence. A device might be able to use a cable firmware problem as some kind of bridge to exploit the computer, but given that the connection provided is PCIE, an evil device can be as evil as it wants without much help. Kind of like with Firewire, and Firewire doesn't even have active cables.

M O N O P R I C E

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Wait six months. Monoprice will have them for $10. : )

Re:M O N O P R I C E

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they'll be crap. Get the $15 one.

Where are the hubs? Desktops mac with TB will need

[Joe_Dragon]

Where are the hubs / brake out boxes? Desktops mac with TB will need some kind of one or at least 2 TB ports or TB + mini DP port. To make it so you can plug and unplug TB Peripherals with out needed to unplug the display from the chain. And if apple ever kills USB ports or E-net ports then more TB ports / TB to usb or TB to E-net cables will be needed.

Also how will a DESKTOP with a DESKTOP video card work with TB? A loop back cable to add in the video card out put on the DP side to the TB bus?

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[Amouth]

It's a safe assumption that Thunderbolt will make it into everything Apple sells within the next month or so ... MacBook Air ...

I doubt you will see it int he MacBook Air -- they didn't even bothered for an RJ45 jack.. also i think the TB connector profile is tall er than the Air's base frame is.

Bummer.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping this article was about HTC. I think I'm going to pick up a Thunderbolt. Love the LTE speed!

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[jedidiah]

> and of course actually allows people to connect real storage to the mini-server(provided
> they throw a thunderbolt port in the next mini, which they would have be insane not too).

Sounds a lot like an Acer Revo. Except the Revo has an eSata port.

Although a small office environment would likely be quite content with any GigE NAS device.

Smart?

[manekineko2]

Wonderful! Then every time I pick up an additional cable, it's like I'm upgrading my entire peripheral connector support, with costs to match!

Who needs to buy a new USB cable when you could be buying a USB cable plus USB PC Card expansion in one!

Even better, I currently have a box of like 50 assorted USB cables in my closet. Now with Thunderbolt, when I need to connect a peripheral, I won't be able to just reach in and find one who's length matches. I'll need to go in and find a cable with the right length that is also compatible with my device's speed even though they all have the same connectors.

This whole thing sounds like a marketer's wet dream.

Re:Smart?

[nonsequitor]

I bet you the engineers have faster cables using ultra-flexible fiber optics, but they likely still cost thousands of dollars to make, or maybe they can't make them durable enough yet. I work with embedded bus analyzers that have transceiver daughter boards for this very reason. It'll be like USB 3.0 devices which are compatible with USB 2.0 & 1.0 ports, though that's just speculation on my part.

This sounds like the same last mile technology I have to my 'fiber' modem, though the modem has better bandwidth at 40d/20u. Thunder bolt has 2 full duplex 10/10 copper pairs for a total of 20/20 GBps at 100% utilization, it's be interesting to see what effective file transfer speeds are after protocol overhead.

Apple corp doesn't know this site exists

[Brannon]

If you think they do then you have dramatically overestimated the size of the geek market compared to the consumer market.

Please enlighten us...

[Brannon]

you clearly know more about signal integrity or market dynamics than Intel or Apple--it would be great if you could teach us all something.

We're waiting...

Yep, that's exactly how it works

[Brannon]

It took 6 years to bring this technology to market, with hundreds of highly skilled engineers working full time on it, and they never thought of that problem. You, with the benefit of your University of Phoenix associate degree and literally months of Python programming experience, have uncovered critical flaws in the technology within 30 seconds of first hearing about it.

There is some serious stupid happening on this forum.

Re:Yep, that's exactly how it works

[mdmkolbe]

So ... "just trust us"? The GP raises a legitimate concern. You haven't answered the concern other than to appeal to authority.

Ok genius

[manekineko2]

So what is their solution to one of these problems?

Let's go for the one where now the box of assorted similar-looking cables is a total pain-in-the-ass mishmash of speed capabilities.

There is no solution, that is the design.

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[jht]

The Thunderbolt port is physically identical to the Mini DisplayPort interface. Uses the same connector. The cable is a little bit thicker than the MDP connector on an Apple Cinema Display, but by fractions. It does extend out a little ways to make room for the transceiver.

It's actually perfect for the Air more than anything else in the lineup, really. Mac laptops have no docking connector, so with the Air the only things you had previously were a pair of USB 2.0 ports, with enough power to drive the removable DVD burner they sell for it. With Thunderbolt (since it's basically a PCIe interface broken out) someone will soon be selling a docking station for Mac laptops that'll support storage, DisplayPort out, Ethernet, and whatever else makes sense to add.

For the same reason, Thunderbolt has the potential to get rid of proprietary Wintel vendor docking systems.

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[Amouth]

i didn't realize that the connector was that small

Gennum, not Gunnum

[Anonymous Coward]

Post has the company name wrong.

Monoprice.com

[scot4875]

Thunderbolt sounded like a pretty interesting technology, but if cables can't be produced for less than $50 I don't think it'll ever take off. It's not like the HDMI situation where Joe Blow walks in off the street to buy an HDTV (a feature he wants) and is told "You need this $70 digital cable to hook up to your receiver," who then proceeds to bend over and shell out the cash to get teh shiny.

I'd expect places like Monoprice.com to start selling them for under $10, and once some actual sub-$1000 peripherals start taking advantage of it it might be worth the upgrade. Until then, for the couple of times per year that I need to do large file transfers, I can live with a slower progress bar.

--Jeremy

Re:Actually it fits quite nicely w/ Apple's strate

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Until Apple starts making real server hardware I can't believe they will make any headway into the market. Even a small-medium sized business wants reliability. A mac mini with a direct attached RAID array doesn't do that. The X-serve didn't do that either. I have an x-serve at work for managing my Macs. It doesn't have redundant power and it doesn't have integrated hardware raid. Small to medium sized businesses also like to conserve space. A 1U rack mount server plus storage array takes up less real estate than a Mac Mini on a desk. On the other hand, a call to Dell or HP for an engineered iSCSI SAN solution with server visualization, backup, and disaster recovery and does that and for a fraction of the cost of a fiber channel SAN. Sure the performance is not as good, but it's good enough for most businesses.

Obviously there will be speed negotiation

[Brannon]

with both endpoints and the cable negotiating on the highest speed that all three of them can support. This is the way that basically all interfaces have worked going back to 300/600/1200 baud modem days (and probably earlier).

The optical cables more than likely are about making a cable that works at speed over longer distances (like 10 meters) than they are about making a higher speed cable. So it will really be that if you need to go 20 ft then you grab a cable that is 20 feet long and which (transparent to you) does fancier stuff in the cable to make it work.

And finally, even if there are 20" cables that are 'faster' than other 20" cables, it doesn't present some sort of unprecedented situation. Have you tried using USB3 speeds over a USB1 cable? People who notice and who care about the performance will use the better cable.

All of you need to turn in your geek cards because you clearly don't understand how computers work.

If you think that's expensive....

[Anonymous Coward]

....Apple have nothing on this:

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM

Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode

[vaporland]

Target disk mode is one of the best innovations Apple's come up with.

Now with Thunderbolt target disk mode, I'll be able to have an external boot device on my Mac Book Air that's worth a damn, or update/transfer data from/to the MBA at lightning speed.

I'd buy that for a fifty...