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Thunderbolt vs. SuperSpeed USB

Posted by Soulskill on from the battle-of-connectivity dept.

Lucas123 writes "When it comes to performance, power and size, external I/O interconnect Thunderbolt handily beats SuperSpeed USB, but in the one critical category — ubiquity — it has an almost impossible uphill battle. Thunderbolt has a maximum 10Gbps signaling rate to SuperSpeed USB's 6Gbps and it offers more than twice the power to devices. To date, however, Apple is the only systems manufacturer to adopt Thunderbolt, and it has done so as an additional device connectivity port, keeping SuperSpeed USB on its computers. No other systems manufacturer has committed to Thunderbolt. In contrast, SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, with numbers continuing to grow."

6 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. TFA (-1, wrong) by plover · · Score: 5, Insightful

    SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware

    No it hasn't. USB may have been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, but SuperSpeed USB is nowhere near as ubiquitous yet. SuperSpeed USB may be able to compatibly downgrade to full-speed USB communication, but that doesn't mean that anything you plug a SuperSpeed device into is magically SuperSpeed.

    Anyway, I like the idea of Thunderbolt, especially the thought that it could become the holy grail of single cable interconnects. But just because I like a thing and it's technically better doesn't mean the world will adopt it. Unfortunately, I've learned that politics and money will drive the decision, not technology.

    --
    John
    1. Re:TFA (-1, wrong) by localman57 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hope you were joking. Didn't they learn from Firewire?!

      No. And they didn't learn from iLink either.

  2. Re:TFA (-2, wrong) by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Funny

    They are holding out for LudicrousSpeed USB.

  3. Firewire by suso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hmm, this sounds just like the Firewire vs. USB competition with Apple pushing Firewire. We saw how that turned out. We all know that being better doesn't mean anything in this industry.

    1. Re:Firewire by chaim79 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wow, how many points wrong can you get...

      Actually I give up, you have so much wrong about firewire that it's pointless to correct you point for point...

      The reason Firewire is more expensive is that it's a system that requires some processing on both sides, any device that plugs into firewire has to have sufficient smarts to know what it needs in order to operate, USB on the other hand is a dumb protocol, all the processing is handled on the Host (PC) side, and all the devices plugged into it need very little smarts, this directly effects chip/design costs of peripherals. Firewire was actually designed with the concept that a scanner with a firewire port and a printer with a firewire port could be connected together and pictures printed without using computer resources.

      USB also has the limitation of regimented and inflexible bandwidth (at least as of USBv2, v3 might change that). Which means while USB 2 may have 480mb of 'bandwidth' only a small chunk of that is usable by any one device, Firewire however is flexible, not only can it portion the bandwidth to the devices need but it can also use "Isochronous" (regular dedicated) bandwidth, allowing high-priority/bandwidth systems to transfer information, such as video/audio streams and critical systems (some internal aircraft systems use 1394 bus).

      You want lots of high-speed external storage access, check some benchmarks, firewire will beat out USB for real-world performance, even though they are fairly matched just reading spec numbers.

      Firewire is both faster and better than USB, however it's more expensive in both hardware and design/implementation, which is why USB has won that fight, the majority of people are all about cheep, not better.

      --
      DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
      AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
      Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
  4. Maximum cable length by thue · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thunderbolt is interesting because of the potential maximum cable length. The current cupper cables are limited to 3 meters, but once optical cables are available, "10s of meters" will be possible.

    Since you can run both display, keyboard and mouse over one cable natively, this means that you can put your computer with its noisy fans into the basement, use a single thunderbolt cable, and just have an extremely thin client at your workstation.