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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Should I even get you started on FireWire? :P
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
There's also something to be said for a universal port, one that can be used to connect anything. You get audio and video via the DisplayPort aspect, and generic connectivity via the PCIe aspect. The question is, will the cost of implementation (expensive chipsets and cables) make it useless for cheap peripherals (like a mouse, keyboard, microphone, etc). Perhaps the cost of those will eventually come down enough that it won't matter, or perhaps we'll always see a mix of USB and Thunderbolt on computers, or perhaps all the low-bandwidth devices will migrate to wireless.
TB (made by Intel) is not a direct competitor to USB3 (started by Intel). While you can use USB3 for some file transfers it's not good for sustained usage. TB if meant to replace ethernet, video, eSATA and USB3 all in one cable. If you have a laptop, you can get a dock which only works for your manufacturer (and sometimes model) or you can use TB to hook all of those up. That is the promise of TB.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.