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Thunderbolt On Windows: Hardware and Performance Explored
MojoKid writes "Intel's Light Peak technology eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. It wasn't a huge surprise that Apple got an early exclusivity agreement, but there were actually a number of other partners on board as well, including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital. On the Windows front, Thunderbolt is still in its infancy and though there are still a few bugs to work out of systems and solutions, Thunderbolt capable motherboards and devices for Windows are starting to come to market. Performance-wise in Windows, the Promise RAID DAS system tested here offers near 1GB/s of peak read throughput and 500MB/s for writes, which certainly does leave even USB 3.0 SuperSpeed throughput in the dust."
But, sounds are waves, not bolts.
Surely an exclusive on something that is intended to be a *standard* defeats the purpose? That looks like a year of nearly dead time for non-Macs.
For current devices, USB/SATA really don't tend to be the biggest bottlenecks. It's nice that they're developing technology to improve this. But I have a feeling adoption of this is going to be slow going, since there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.
If that is a Promise RAID box, I Promise the numbers are totally imaginary. Maybe they got that performance for about a second, on a full moon, in the dark, with no one watching.
I don't doubt thunderbolt can do it, but I doubt anything Promise says.
TLDR: Promise sucks.
The article really provides nothing worth reading. It spends a page on "what is Thunderbolt", another page on the motherboards, then a page running a *single* I/O benchmark on a *single* external RAID box, which they compare to an SSD in a USB 3.0 external enclosure (I don't even have to explain why that's stupid), before going straight to "summary and conclusions".
It's a stupid article with a single, astoundingly stupid "test", no insightful remarks or even technical detail. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents. Best of all its hot pluggable, no reset required, heck maybe not even detectable if you do it right by splicing into a users "video" cable, etc.
The spec even allows 7 devices in a daisy chain so you can get owned by an industrial competitor, and the local cops, and your own IT monitoring system, and the IRS, and the CIA and the FBI and MI-6 all at the same time. Fantastic!
Aside from reading, it should be trivial to create a writer to insert a root kit or keylogger into the system.
So much for the bad guys using it. The good guys can use it to bypass any DRM scheme. A little magic box plugs in, and watches memory as the decrypted file appears and is rendered. All that HDCP stuff is irrelevant, bypassed. Or, on the fly, keys are sniffed out.
If only they could have just multiplexed a USB over the displayport, or firewire, but no, they had to provide a root access connector that is now standardized across many devices. Oh boy is this going to be fun.
I honestly believe this is why rollout has been so slow, a frantic flurry of trying to figure out some way to patch the massive gaping goatse sized hole. Dev kits still not available, or so I'm told.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't think "matured" into Thunderbolt is the right way to put it, at all.
Thunderbolt itself is just an interim solution on the way to Light Peak.
In addition, I don't think it will be fully "mature", Light Peak or no, unless and until they can start making cheaper cables. In general, I would say an active cable is not a good idea. It really raises the price.
A way should be found to put the "active" components inside the devices at either end, with the (now much cheaper) cable running between them.
The real problem is getting new adoption for a new standard, especially when USB3 is just coming out of the gate. And for most people USB2/3 works just fine. Thunderbolt though, it won't have any place for another 5-6 years if that. And to be honest, I see devices in the near future shifting from Firewire to USB3 as well, USB is cheaper.
Om, nomnomnom...
Thunderbolt is an awesome technology but at this point in time it's really, really expensive. Even the cable (which Apple does not provide) will run you at least $50. Firewire, which is dying a slow death, was the same thing. Clearly much faster than USB and USB2 but the PC makers deemed it too expensive to include so it never got much momentum outside of Apple. USB is everywhere now and it's going to hard to displace. Anyone remember the DVORAK keyboard? The QWERTY keyboard in use today was originally designed to make you type SLOWER so as not to jam the keys on the old manual typewriters in use at the time. The DVORAK design was designed to increase typing speed yet it never caught on. Why? People were used to the QWERTY keyboard and didn't want to change. It's too early to tell but I hope that Thunderbolt does not meet the same fate.
Probably the broadest use case for Thunderbolt for average users (i.e. not doing on the fly video, etc.) is essentially a single port universal docking connector. Plug in your laptop or tablet upon arriving back at your desk, and get your monitor, keyboard, mouse, and extremely fast or large file storage in one small cable.
First, that complaint is true of essentially all external busses, including SCSI, SAS, eSATA and virtually everything else except USB. They're setup that way for a reason -- DMA is much, much faster.
Second, memory access on modern busses is routed through an IOMMU. This provides both memory abstraction (which is vital on modern architectures) and allows the OS to control which devices, if any, can access a particular memory location.
Do a little research instead of speaking out your ass. All of these, including PCI-E, thunderbolt, even Firewire allow for DMA
What is the plan for AMD and non on board video systems?
Like LGA 2011? will that get Thunderbolt or will HIGH end desktops and workstations get locked out of TB while lower end system have it?
Will severs get it? I don't see Intel on board video in servers any time soon and Ivy Bridge-E will use LGA 2011.
Its a nice docking bay standard for laptops. Outside of that there are much better choices for desktop PCs.
For one SAS makes a much better disk attachment interface, as the x4 links normally used for external connections are already 24Gbit, and they can be ganged together. Plus, there are dozens if not hundreds of vendors selling external SAS arrays. Many of which can do significantly more than 1GB/sec read/write.
Thirdly, I can't see anyone actually using an external PCIe enclosure with a graphics card connected over 20Gbit of PCIe. A big part of graphics performance is moving things over the bus. Its the graphics card vendors shipping x16 boards and pushing for faster standards. I can see people connecting a bunch of monitors using the display port connections in thunderbolt. I can also see an assortment of proprietary pcie devices sitting in an enclosure like that, but I doubt the market is large enough to really justify inexpensive pcie enclosures. Hence the current prices, which seem to indicate the enclosure is going to cost more than a complete PC.
I can see people using TB instead of firewire to transfer data from prosumer cameras, but I suspect that most home camcorders will be limited to USB3.
Frankly, its a docking bay standard for people who bought laptops without expresscard slots. Its also peace of mind for people buying >$2.2k laptops that they won't get stranded with USB3 and giant hubs.
that needs to be a data only or loop back video ver of TB.
At the very lest have a voodoo like loopback system where you can use any DP output and add it to the TB bus so you can use that X79 chipset or that add it video card as your main video out or even put a video card on the TB bus and make it the MAIN VIDEO CARD.
firewire had add in cards and was not tie to chipsets or even intel.
less then pci-e X4 is poor for video cards and useing one maxes out the BUS. Why not just use External PCI Express and get full pci-e speed.
http://www.molex.com/molex/products/family?key=external_pci_express_pcie&channel=products&chanName=family&pageTitle=Introduction
Speaking of high end workstations being locked out of TB...
Thunderbolt was conspicously missing from the recent Mac Pro refresh.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A bunch of Apple fluff articles about what wonderful and world-changing technologies are just around the corner and Windows FUD appears just as the WWDC is occurring in San Francisco.
I have a round bin labeled "political advertisement" into which all such things are dumped.
How convenient.
You are welcome on my lawn.
great, when is linux getting it? What's that, Intel doesn't care? After multiple speeches from multiple Intel executives at several conferences they don't move at all on publishing a software spec for it. We're not asking for a diagram of how it works, (there are enough of those) give us a bus, a frequency, something!
How can we complain about Apple if you are giving us all these actual facts?
I can see keyboard/mouse and maybe audio going wireless. When you're pushing a high resolution monitor (24-30") wireless display isn't all that great. Also, even with dual-chanel 5GHz wifi a gigabit ethernet cable is still substantially faster.
Personally I have a Dell with a docking station connector on the bottom. Docking bay has all the ports you need: power/usb/ethernet/audio/DVI/displayport/VGA/eSATA.
So it can do that, but the bandwidth is a little low. Real internal PCIe is 500MB/sec per lane for 2.0, 1GB/sec per lane for 3.0. So a 16x slot is 8 or 16GB/sec. At just 1.25GB/sec, TB is slightly better than 2x PCIe 2.0, or slightly better than 1x PCIe 3.0.
Now, while even high end GPUs don't need the full 16x of bandwidth, they generally need at least 4x to perform well, and can even need more than that to utilize themselves fully.
So TB can do it, but there may be a limit to how well. It'll work for lower end cards certainly, but them maybe you have one of those in the laptop anyhow. It won't be something for a high end GPU unless they increase the speed on it.
I think part of the confusion is that TB is spec'd in terms of gigabits, like most network stuff, whereas system interconnects are spec'd in terms of gigabytes (or megabytes) normally and some people miss that. Also 10Gbits sounds, and is, fast, but not for system interconnects.
GPUs just move a lot of data.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Thunderbolt-zum-Nachruesten-1605289.html
The QWERTY keyboard was designed to space out letters most used on a manual typewriter so the heads would not jam, thus making it FASTER to type. When the electronic typewriter, and then computer came out this keyboard was no longer the most efficient. Alternatives, like the DVORAK keyboard were created which allow you to type faster on the newer mediums, once you got used to the new layout.
The problem being that people already knew the QWERTY keyboard and didn't want to learn how to type again. Not thinking what ever speed improvements were worth the pain.
The claim of QWERTY being designed to type SLOWER is a false myth.
From Wikipedia: A popular myth is that QWERTY was designed to "slow down" typists though this is incorrect - it was designed to prevent jams while typing at speed, allowing typists to type faster.
The Mac Pro was missing from the recent Mac Pro refresh....
limit of 7 devices and Daisy chains kills it for lot's of USB tasks like mouse and keyboards.
low-bandwidth devices will migrate to wireless so now you have deal with battery in more then one device.
7 devices per port? The 7 device limit is a daisy-chaining limit, as far as I can tell, not a maximum number of devices. How many devices currently hooked up to a typical computer are daisy-chained? The number of ports would likely be far more important than the maximum number of daisy-chain hops. Let's assume audio will always remain on 3.5mm jacks for headphone compatibility and assume that any thunderbolt monitor is going to have a daisy chain thunderbolt port at the very least.
On a desktop computer, the minimum number of tbolt connectors would be two. Desktop -> monitor -> keyboard, desktop -> mouse, that would get you all your core functionality (audio, again, being assumed to be inappropriate for tbolt). For a laptop computer, the keyboard is built-in, but people often like a real mouse, so you can get away with a single port.
The problem is, of course, that these scenarios would leave no extra connectivity for expansion. It would seem that a desktop would need at least three or four tbolt ports before it could conceivably replace all other digital connections on a computer. Unless you want to consider stuff like thunderbolt docks (or displays with thunderbolt docks built in), in which case the computer itself needs only one or two ports, although you're not really going thunderbolt-only that way.
First, that complaint is true of essentially all external busses, including SCSI, SAS, eSATA and virtually everything else except USB. They're setup that way for a reason -- DMA is much, much faster.
No, it's not true of "essentially all" external busses. SCSI, SAS, eSATA, and USB all implement DMA in the host controller chip. The peripheral device has no idea it's happening, it just sees an abstract block device interface (or, in the case of USB, SCSI commands encapsulated through USB).
Where DMA is implemented in a visible way to things which plug into your computer via an external port is Thunderbolt, Firewire, Cardbus, and ExpressCard. 3 of those 4 are just different takes on hotplug PCI. The stupid thing about the handwringing re: Thunderbolt is that you rarely if ever see these "OMG IT'S SO INSECURE" dudes whine about CardBus and ExpressCard, which are extremely widely deployed interfaces.
(and, of course, the methods for securing the computer in spite of these interfaces are also old news, but that's never gonna stop a Chicken Little)
I'd be hard pressed to use 7 usb ports. Mouse, Keyboard, phone(data connection), 1-2 usb drives. Printer?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
This is almost $30. Terrible...
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD463
Things will come down as the port becomes more wide spread.