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Intel's Thunderbolt With Fiber Optics Years Away
CWmike writes "Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect technology could be years away from getting optical technology, an Intel executive said this week at IDF. Originally introduced in February on Macs, Thunderbolt was pitched as being optical technology but currently uses copper wires. Dadi Perlmutter of Intel's Architecture Group said copper wires are working much better than expected, and that fiber was expensive. 'It's going to be way out,' Perlmutter said. 'At the end of the day it's all about how much speed people need versus how much they would be willing to pay.'"
.. we will be the judge of whether we need the speed or not.
I need the optical connection now so that my optical mouse can fully function. Without it, its way too slow!
FireWire was also supposed to 'go optical' at some point, but market forces kept it copper.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I read that as "we don't own all the patents on the interconnect hardware, and to produce it would cost us more than using our in-house patent base and patent-free copper connections. Surprisingly, it turns out we're somewhat incompetent at modeling electrical connections and the results don't match our simulations but they're better than we planned, so we'll patent what we have and plan on taking that to the bank."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've never been a fan of optical cables, they have really poor flexibility for typical use in a desk/office environment. Considering how capable copper thunderbolt is, seems unnecessary.
That's a pretty ridiculous accusation to level at intel.
Sure, Moore's law is one part prediction and one part self fulfilling prophecy, but the progress in computer performance (per watt, per dollar, etc.) over the last 40 years has been pretty nice.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
While "Thunderbolt" is essentially a PCIe 4x external cabling mechanism, rather than a more typical external interface like ethernet, it seems reasonable to assume(for the sake of getting some rough numbers) that the challenges of getting a Thunderbolt 10Gb/s optical connection working would not be less than the challenges of getting other optical 10Gb/s connections working(might be slightly more, if, say, PCIe is touchier about latency or something, might be slightly less if Thunderbolt never promised to support a cable more than 10 meters long; but ballpark here).
Conveniently, there exists just such a 10Gb optical interface: 10GigE. Even better, the optical portion is frequently broken out into a separate module(to allow for multiple different grades of tranceiver, depending on distance and fiber requirements), making it possible to price the optics package separately from the switch to which it attaches.
10GB/s optical XFP or SFP+ modules are, indeed, not all that cheap. Much cheaper than they were; but (at least the Intel ones that some rough retail-pricing showed) still easily as costly as some of the smaller planned "thunderbolt" peripherals...
This is the latest in a very very long series of failures of optical interconnect in multiprocessors, in the computer room, and at the desktop. Since the '80s people have told us that wires will never keep working, and optics is the only solution. They have been wrong, and continue to be wrong. I was even blasted by a respected physicist that told me that there was an inherent power advantage for optics. That was wrong also. Optics is great if you need to go across the ocean, but don't tell me you want to go across the cabinet with it.
TFA reads like an Onion article:
"Copper will continue to improve, which happens. There have been many technologies that had been predicted dead 20 years ago that are still making good progress. We'll see," Perlmutter said.
Aren't optical signals processed via devices connected with copper wires at the end of the day?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
While shorter distances of copper are cheap for communications long distance is expensive and lossy. I wanted a technology that I could run across the house. and still utilize full speed. Cat5e will do for now. I know Cat6 exists but I can get gigabit ethernet for cheaper with cat5e and It works even across the house. Cat6 doesn't do significantly better. Finding adapters to utilize the capabilities of cat5/cat6 as high speed usb 2.0 480Mbits/second cables looks to be a $300 endeavor. Again I know I can buy a long USB2 cable but I'd like to have one set of technology that I can plug anything into like what lightpeak was set out for. Currently I have USB2.0, HDMI, and cat5e. If it was all light peak with its high speed and cheap adapters I could use any cable as any other cable. Its great that they found copper to work good but at what distance? I'm betting if they try going the distance of a room its going to A) cost them an arm and a leg and or B) going to be lossy and slow things down. Sigh.
About a year ago, when I was reading about LightPeak(Thunderbolt), Intel claimed it was going to be 10-40gbit and was going to take a few years *after* 22nm became standard.
Just based on Intel claiming LightPeak was meant to come out after 22nm, means it was released early. I am not surprised that the optical version is still some odd years off.
Personally, I think this early release was a mix of Apple and Intel. Apple wanting the fastest and unique, and Intel wanting to make at least some money on their tech as it has been in development for quite a long time. I remember reading about "some optical tech that will scale to 100gbit and become standard", from Intel back near 2005.
Whats the point of it if we can use USB3? USB3 is compatible with my current USB devices Thunderbolt is not. Thunderbolt cost of implementing is higher than USB3. Its not that much faster there are almost no devices for thunderbolt. How many copper wires does it need? How would it scale for distances of say 50 feet? The real distance of going around the room if you don't go under the rug. If they stuck with fiber and had copper for power and sold adapters like they had set out to do. Even though its not that big of improvement in speed over usb3 it would have had a chance. Compatibility of USB3 is going to kick it under the rug. It is surely a dead end technology now.
Now that graphics cards are powerful enough to drive 3 or more full HD displays all that's missing is a way to connect them across the home. LightPeak looked like a perfect fit: across one cable you could connect a display, a USB infra-red remote, and even USB drives or an SD reader. And with the fiber optic cable there was no range issue. You could just go through the attic and to the other side of the house, tens of meters away if you so wanted.
But then all we got is Thunderbolt with a measly 3m maximum length. That's just enough to go from one side of an (L-shaped) desk to the other :-(
And no, $2000 connected web TVs are not the solution. Sure they may play some AVIs, maybe some MP4s, but there are also a lot of formats they don't support, Flash, MP4s with the higher end options enabled, etc. And for subtitles it's even worse. And in a couple of years when everyone standardizes on WebM or whatever the new video codec is you'll have to splash another two grands. Not because the display quality is bad, just because it's too old for the manufacturer to bother issuing firmware upgrades to support the new formats. What a waste.
Right, because the one thing a technology company can expect is zero competitors attempting to eat their lunch.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
4 channel Light Ridge Thunderbolt controllers can do 4x10 = 40 gbps bidirectionally. Since it's PCIe (8/10 is data), that's 32 gbps. That's equivalent to PCIe 2.0 8x (16x is 8 GB/s = 64 gbps). So it should be enough for even really high end external GPUs. And IMO that's the most relevant application. Intel wants to go the Ultrabook route, and the only way to make that viable is to enable the ability for people to connect high-end desktop class GPUs to their high-end CPU packing ultrabooks.
What about the Sony Vaio Z docking station Power Media Dock? It was advertised June 28 to be using ”an optical cable” and ‘Light Peak’.
http://presscentre.sony.eu/content/detail.aspx?ReleaseID=6836&NewsAreaId=2
It is available now, at $499.99,
http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&partNumber=VGPPRZ20A/B#features