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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."
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.
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.
What I expect from Thunderbolt is not to use it as a link to a storage device, but to a graphic card. This way you could have a CPU and memory heavy laptop to carry around, but then you could dock it at home and connect it to the external graphic card and play some video games.
Apparently this interface can do 10 Gbps, and that sounds like a good start.
With an IOMMU in between, which the OS can use to protect sensitive memory.
That's all true of the PCI-E slots you already have on your motherboard. Do you hot glue those too?
It is not much different than firewire with DMA access and hotplug? IOMMU's plugged that hole years ago.
No sir I dont like it.
There are already multiple alternatives to thunderbolt.
That's why some of us are less than excited about a closely held standard that requires the purchase of a Mac or a $400 Intel motherboard and also requires $50 cables.
The enclosure in the article is pretty expensive too.
> There is a market, but you're not it.
You are even less in it than I am.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
(I'll assume you're speaking from a windows point of view on FW?)
As does the vast, vast majority of computer users out there. I don't think anyone would argue that fact, right?
That's why USB 3.0 is going to ultimately be the standard...it's backward compatible and everyone is still using mostly USB peripherals. Until that changes (which it probably won't, regardless of capability, look at how long VGA has been hanging on, and that standard is 30 years old), USB x.0 will likely be the dominant standard for peripherals based on that fact alone.
Geeks like going out and buying new peripherals to take advantage of the new capabilities of new standards. Most people, though, just want something that's going to work with the shit they've already got.