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."

Comments

Not hundreds of different types

[Anonymous Coward]

But literally, just hundreds.

So three monitors and ninety-seven hard drives?

[Kenja]

Or are they also counting the computers with an unused thunderbolt port on them?

Re:So three monitors and ninety-seven hard drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a Thunderbolt port as kind of like Sacagawea dollar. Just like I can trade my Sacagawea dollar in at the bank for a real dollar, I can go buy a converter for my Thunderbolt port to turn it into a real port.

Re:So three monitors and ninety-seven hard drives?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Architecturally, this is true: with the ugly exception of the fact that a very high speed peripheral bus and a video-out interface were bodged into the same connector for no wildly obvious reason.

Because Firewire was a data-only thing, the probability that a given device would daisy-chain was actually pretty decent in the real world, and you could put the non-cooperative freak on the end of the chain. Thunderbolt more analogous to a port that sneaks firewire into your VGA-out(albeit in a way that makes splitting much more complex than a simple mechanical pinout adapter, is my understanding). Because there are loads of video-only devices in the world, the vast majority don't daisy-chain because video devices aren't expected to.

This is the trouble for Thunderbolt: As with classy firewire devices, most of the "thunderbolt peripherals" daisy-chain just fine. However, your Thunderbolt port is also your only video-out port, and something north of 99% of monitors, TVs, projectors, etc. have never heard of this 'daisy-chain' business.

Re:So three monitors and ninety-seven hard drives?

[UnknowingFool]

"for no wildly obvious reason"
Except for a single cable that replaces a laptop dock. You might argue that there isn't much additional functionality that Thunderbolt has over a dock, the major advantage is that Thunderbolt will be universal while a dock is limited only to a manufacturer and even only to certain models from that manufacturer.

Also, DisplayPort or mini-DisplayPort is the the connector which is cable compatible with HDMI and you don't need to daisy chain it.

Re:So three monitors and ninety-seven hard drives?

[gman003]

You make a somewhat valid point, but think about it from the vendor's point of view:

You need to have computers support TB before you can really sell devices using TB. People don't buy a hard drive or monitor, and then find a computer that will use it; they find a computer they want and then buy a hard drive or monitor that will work with *that*, simply because it's cheaper to buy a new monitor than it is to buy a new computer.

The laptop I have on preorder has a TB port. I don't particularly care about that either way - it seems to have displaced the eSATA port, and the only eSATA device I have works as USB just as well. But, when I'm out shopping for [device] in a year from now, TB will be an option, and possibly the best option.

Vendors know, through long experience, to build up the supporting devices (ones that support the new standard as well as old ones) well before making devices that primarily or exclusively use the new standard. Even a decade after USB 1.1, computers had legacy PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice. Even years after DVI was itself made technically obsolete, computers were coming with VGA ports.

Remember when USB first came out? At first, nothing really used it. You'd see printers support it as an option, right next to the old parallel port; you'd see a few USB mice and keyboards, often packaged with a PS/2USB converter. But now, you have to look long and hard to find a computer *without* USB, and finding legacy PS/2 keyboards or parallel cables is rather difficult.

Thunderbolt isn't guaranteed to take off the same way (remember FireWire? Or the countless mini-DVI ports? Or any other failed standard?), but it *could*. And so device manufacturers throw it in, especially since Intel's chipsets support it *anyways*. It's another bullet point to put on the marketing, but it could be that small little edge against [competitor], right?

Wiki knows about it

[RobertLTux]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

since im against the whole LMFGI thing i will just drop a wikilink for you.

What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

look at the cable teardown

[YesIAmAScript]

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.

Re:look at the cable teardown

[PhrstBrn]

There is not a single thunderbolt cable on that list. It's just a bunch of displayport cables labeled thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is a combo displayport + PCIe, those cables just deal with the displayport signal and ignore the PCIe part.

Re:What is it again?

[DurendalMac]

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.

The God Cable

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What is it again?

[hoggoth]

Ah, finally we can have one port to rule them all! It's about time.

I think this is appropriate.

Wow, Slashdotters have gotten stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Wow, Slashdotters have gotten stupid

[pla]

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.

You left out "insanely expensive active cabling, safely locked up under patent for its entire realistic lifetime".

This will survive right up until people actually take notice, buy something using it, then shit a uranium brick when they go to buy a longer cord.

Right because I want all my devices having DMA

[Sycraft-fu]

You realize a device on the PCIe bus can do ANYTHING to a system, right? At that low a level it has complete access to memory, it can crash your system, or worse, and there's shit you can do about it. That's part of the reason for USB to be like it is. It provides very high level access, it is all controlled through the CPU. Means a lot of overhead, but also more security.

Also there's the fact that TB costs a whole lot more to implement in devices. USB slave devices are dumb, most of the logic is on the master, the computer. Not the case with PCIe, you need more logic to work on the bus, so shit will cost more.

It has its place, potentially, don't get me wrong. But this idea that it'll replace everything is silly. You don't want a TB mouse. You want a USB mouse.

Re:erm... what?

[SuricouRaven]

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.