Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?