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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."
or maybe, once production is ramped up, prices will go down. Since that's what generally happens with new technology.
Just wait for Monster Cables to bring out their gold plated $800 Thunderbolt cable!
... wait, what?
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.
This is the first time I've ever seen it said on Slashdot that Apple's price on something is justified.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
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.
Monstar L
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.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
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.
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
WTF is Thunderbolt?
http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm.
This way you can daisy-chain a couple of devices without losing speed.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
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 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.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Standards are like toothbrushes: everyone agrees you should have one, but no one wants to use yours.
Well, also, the video channel is separate from the data channel (there's 20gbit/sec aggregate bandwidth)
-Bucky
Google it you mouth-breathing moron.
Mouth-breathing morons use Bing, you insensitive clod!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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...
*hile*
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.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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?
I am trolling
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.