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Expect Hundreds of Thunderbolt Devices, Says Intel
An anonymous reader writes "Thunderbolt ports have been spotted on a PC motherboard, but the reality is that the technology is far from mainstream outside of Apple products. Which is why it is interesting to hear Intel predict that 'a hundred' Thunderbolt devices are expected to be on the market by the end of the year. The comment was made this week at Intel's presentation at IDF in Beijing. Ultrabooks with Thunderbolt are expected to appear this year."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)
since im against the whole LMFGI thing i will just drop a wikilink for you.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
In short, it's a combination of both Mini DisplayPort and PCI Express, multiplexed together and demultiplexed at the reciever, but the controller is smart enough to maintain backwards compatibility with regular old displayport 1.2, so your MiniDP adapters will still work.
This isn't something that Monoprice can make for $1.
There's a CPU and a significant transceiver chip the connectors on each end of the cable.
They're going to be more expensive than USB 3 cables no matter where you get them from.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Ah, but this is one port to rule them all. Conceivably, this could be the only port (aside from the charger) on an ultrabook, maybe a USB port or two in addition. Add a Thunderbolt docking station and you can add ANY port that can be placed on a PCIe bus, even an external GPU.
I understand it's just another port to plug things in. Just what we need, laptops with fifteen different input and output ports. VGA, DVI, HDMI, DP, USB3, whatever thunderbolt is, FW, eSATA, unique docking connector, Ethernet, unique power socket, and a card reader for eighteen different cards. I'm sure I've missed a few.
The point is, it's a "God cable." It can, without exaggeration, replace all of those you listed, except the power socket one.
(For example, A MacBook Air has a thunderbolt port and one USB port, and can connect to all the other peripheral types you mention with just those. And that USB port is just for convenience.)
Unfortunately, it's currently priced accordingly. Also, it suffers from the Competing Standards problem.
Thuderbolt just extends the PCIe bus to external devices, with all the speed and flexibility that entails, no biggie, right? Sure, it means you really could get rid of all the other ports completely and use a breakout cable if necessary (only in the interim as other types of ports might just go away), making devices much smaller and simpler. But we don't want fantastic new things, we just want solid legacy support for 10 - 20 year old standards.
Really. All a geek should need to know is "externalize PCIe". All the speed of an internal bus (and more) without having to physically put the card into the machine, and even being able to do it at a distance. Greater modularity, better performance. But apparently it's bad to have newer, better things, when we could just stick with the older, crappier. Right?
Thunderbolt is a high speed device interface that has similar performance to PCI Express. It supports a wide range of devices that require very high bandwidth and low latency I/O operations, including displays, network adapters, mass storage devices (Disk Drives, RAID arrays etc.) and things like that. Like USB, the port can supply power to attached devices but it runs at much higher data rates than even USB 3.0. Currently it is generally only supported by Apple but the article is saying that it is starting to show up on more generic X86 hardware.
Looking at the comparisons I've found, seems that Thunderbolt is likely to put a spanner in the works for USB 3.0 support. Why bother with USB 3.0 when this port exists at about the same price? Yea there is the compatibility issue with USB, but I have a feeling they will leave the USB 2.0 ports and just add Thunderbolt until they can send USB to the same place printer and serial ports went. Given the bandwidth available on this port, you can put multiple displays and a hand full of disk drives on one port and do away with the VGA, DVI, and eSATA ports in one shot.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
> Now, you can plug in all your hard drives (via USB or FireWire or eSATA) into the monitor on top of your desk instead of fumbling around behind the machine underneath.
I just use front facing hot swap drive bays. Doesn't matter if it is drives in the main chassis or drives in an external enclosure. They don't sit anywhere near the monitor. I would not want them to.
For "fumble-devices", I have a hub sitting on top of the desk.
PCs also tend to have front facing USB and Firewire ports.
You're trying to invent problems that don't actually exist.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's more useful on laptops. Get home, plug your laptop into just two cables (Thunderbolt and power) and you're ready to go with your big monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, external drives, network and that silly light-up snowman your mother bought you for Christmas. Just like you could do with a docking station, except not limited to just a few laptops by one vendor and without taking up a big chunk of desk.
First, VESA controls DisplayPort specification, not Apple. Second Apple has offered mini-DisplayPort royalty-free when they offered to VESA to include it in the latest spec. Lastly, nothing in the Thunderbolt specs says that companies must use the mini-DSP connector; they can use the full-size connector if they feel paranoid about it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Your feelings are not mired in reality but flawed perceptions. Again, VESA controls the standard. This is some of the same illogical thinking when people listed Apple controlling AAC as a reason not to use iPods (Apple doesn't control that standard either). The fact that many, many devices are coming out with ThunderBolt says the manufacturers are not concerned about this or they would have objected to Intel.
I take it from your feelings that you avoid using any WebKit based browser like Chome, don't use CUPS, or any software that Apple contributes to Open Source.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.