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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."
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.
OEMs are more pragmatic than that. If it's a salable tech that is already developed and offered by a major player like Intel, they'll use it, whether it smells of Apple seconds or not.
With an IOMMU in between, which the OS can use to protect sensitive memory.
No it's been a year of geeks like you claiming that Thunderbolt was somehow an Apple technology when it was not. It is an always has been Intel technology; Apple helped Intel develop it. Apple did not get an exclusionary deal for their efforts; they simply got a year head start on all the other computer manufacturers. In that year others have implemented it. OEMs have been slower no doubt because some have wondered if I was worth implementing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's all true of the PCI-E slots you already have on your motherboard. Do you hot glue those too?
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.
You don't have even the slightest idea what you're talking about. You grabbed hold of a few concepts that you apparently don't fully comprehend and then used them to rant about surveillance. A sibling of mine posted the IOMMU thing already, but that wasn't the only howler in your post. Firewire also allows DMA so your purported solution wouldn't work for exactly the wrong reasons you were complaining about Thunderbolt. And even if they were legitimate objections, you're screwed if an attacker has physical access anyway.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.
I realize you're not trashing it and it was probably a verbal slipup, but I have to say, you seem to have an odd definition of "just enough". ;)
One Thunderbolt connector carries two full-duplex 10 Gb/s links, or 20 Gb/s total (bidirectional). 60Hz refresh of a 2560x1440 27" display with 8 bits per channel needs 2560*1440*3*8*60 = 5.3 Gb/s. One lane of PCIe 2.0 is equivalent to 4 Gb/s (5 nominal, but 8b10b line coding means it's 4 actual, while Thunderbolt has a much-closer-to-100% efficient line coding). So Thunderbolt can refresh Apple's Thunderbolt Display with enough bandwidth left over for >3 PCIe 2.0 lanes.
The Thunderbolt Display doesn't just have USB, by the way. It also has a gigabit ethernet port and FW800. Those, and the USB, are all local PCI Express host controllers which communicate to the computer by tunneling PCIe through Thunderbolt. That's how Thunderbolt works: it tunnels PCIe and DisplayPort packets. All other protocols require a PCI Express host controller at the far end.
Should I even get you started on FireWire? :P
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.