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New Thunderbolt Revision Features 20 Gbps Throughput, 4K Video Support
hooligun writes "The next-gen Thunderbolt tech (code-named Falcon Ridge) enables 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously in addition to running at 20 Gbps. It will be backward-compatible with previous-gen Thunderbolt cables and connectors, and production is set to ramp up in 2014. An on-stage demo with fresh-off-the-press silicon showed the new Thunderbolt running 1,200 Mbps, which is certainly a step up from what's currently on the market."
So, will we see OEM Windows PCs come by default with Thunderbolt ports? Or is this another fantastic, magical, extraordinary Apple Inc. exclusive?
Apple has pissed off all the other CE manufacturers. There will be nothing to plug the other end into.
Without general support great features are worthless. Apple is repeating Sony's mistake with betamax. They won't share, thus it will fail.
Great technology without support is worthless.
But in the end, it all comes down to cost. Current Thunderbolt displays are rather expensive. Heck, I picked up a dual-link DVI monitor of the same resolution for $275 on ebay! why pay three to four times as much for something with only a small few bells and whistles added on?
Thunderbolt, overall, is great in terms of performance, but it just seems to be well beyond what most folks are willing to pay. It's like that guy who brags about how "My car has a Turbo Kit option from the dealer" but he NEVER SPENDS THE MONEY TO GET IT.
The external drives, the only situation that I'd actually be interested in, are also stupid expensive. In the long run, just better off either using E-SATA, USB3, or internalizing the drives. Same goes for daisy chaining monitors. Want to run tons of monitors? Install more video cards! woo.
no more coffee for me after 5pm, k? ._.
What could I connect this to?
Several RAID arrays, gigabit ethernet, multiple monitors, misc external storage (like single disks or a DROBO).
All with one connector...
Yes Thunderbolt stuff was slow to come out, but the rate of arrival has picked up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_good_enough
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Mbps != MBps
Please stop doing that in article summaries. When you start getting up into large numbers like that you can't just expect everyone to "read what you meant to say."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I do 10GbE drivers, and the previous generation of tbolt did not really offer 10Gb/s of usable bandwidth to PCIe devices, it was more like 8Gb/s:
If you recall, tbolt muxes PCIe and Display Port. On the PCIe side, the thunderbolt bridge passed 2 lanes of Gen2 PCIe through to devices. Since Gen2 is "5GT/s" per lane, you'd think you'd have 10Gb/s. But not really, as "10Gb/s" does not take into account PCIe overhead, which can be about 20% of the data transfer rate. So on the original "10Gb/s" thunderbolt, you were lucky to get 7Gb/s transfer rate from 10GbE NIC, once you also add in network protocol overheads.
Having a bus-constrained NIC leads to all sorts of weird problems when receiving data.. With flow control disabled in combination with bursty transfers, you often see far less than the 7Gb/s peak, as TCP hunts around to find the constraint and recover from frequent packet loss events.
It sounds like they've built the new part from 2 lanes of Gen3 PCIe, which should be good for ~16Gb/s of usable bandwidth. This is a very welcome change, as 16Gb/s should be enough for a single-port 10GbE NIC running at full speed, and a disk controller talking to a fast SSD or an external RAID array that can deliver ~750MB/s (bytes) of I.O.
Just don't try to use a bonded 2 port 10GbE NIC, or you're back at the bandwidth constrained problem.
Do you have any insight why they even bother with TB when 10Gb Ethernet already exists and has been deployed for ages? I.e. why not just use 10GbE instead?
It seems like reinventing the wheel for no real gain.
When all you have is a hammer...
The main reason for using Thunderbolt over 10Gb Ethernet is that one has a fairly significant protocol overhead (Ethernet) while the other is primarily a bus protocol, and operates at a much lower level than Ethernet does. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, each has their application.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
... Thunderbolt tech enables 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously in addition to running at 20 Gbps. It will be backward-compatible with previous-gen Thunderbolt cables and connectors ...
And even faster with gold-plated Monster cables / connectors !
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you wanted to configure your macbook to match a *current* mac pro, you'd need 8 more full i7 cores (assuming you have four in the macbook), four hard drives, four external graphics engines, and 48 gb (I think) of RAM... all strung out on your thunderbolt cable. And a *lot* of power supply wiring. Not sure that's an equivalence that is worth much.
And add to that whatever they do with the next Mac pro upgrade they say they're working on... More cores? More ram? Faster system bus? All of the above? No, don't think your macbook is quite there, lol.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
SO basically, they've increase the voltage by 400%, dropped the current by half, added some more wires and made some special new connectors? Oh and given it another name which is Nature_Scary_Thing . Electricity_Word to match their previous hipster names? I'm not seeing the big deal here yet.
Then you need to get your eyes checked. It also offers display port pass through and access to the PCI bus. Does USB3 offer any of that? Oh, and you can get USB3 and Gigabit Ethernet through a Thunderbolt dock if you really want to.
In a nutshell, USB3 can be a subset of Thunderbolt but not the other way around.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Because 10GBe doesn't expose PCI to your peripherals
How about ExpEther technology virtualizes PCI Express over Ethernet.
Why are manufacturers coming out almost-but-not-good-enough connector standards one after another?
Both tablets and TVs are leaving PC displays in the dust, and new PC connector standards that aren't even available yet already don't have the required bandwidth to support displays that are coming to market now, let alone in the future!
For example, support for full 4K video over 20 Gbps is bullshit, because some aspect of the full spec has to be abandoned:
Resolution: 3840 x 2160
Bits per pixel: 30 or 36 (10 or 12 bits per color channel)
3D or High Framerate: 120 fps
This adds up to: 3840 * 2160 * 30 * 120 = 29.8 Gbps.
Sure, you can drop the framerates, but then expect to have a headache viewing 3D. The bit-depth can be lowered, but then expect visible banding when using gamuts that are wider than sRGB. The resolution can't be lowered, because calling 3840 pixels "4K" is already a stretch.
Originally Light Peak was supposed to basically just be an external PCIe bus (and it could be internal too). The idea was a connector for things that need lower overhead than USB, and also hopefully eventually a single connector for all kinds of things. With the original goal of 100gbps, that would have been realistic (optical was the original interface design).
However things got changed pretty quick in part for cost reasons, but also because Apple got involved (meaning gave Intel money). Apple is obsessed with less cables because cables = evil in their mindset. So it got changed to be display + PCIe on one cable.
That had negative implications for the bandwidth, but also for the cost and ability to implement it. If it was just PCIe, well then a PCIe-thunderbolt card would be real feasible, and you could add a thunderbolt port by hanging it off the PCI bus. However with display integrated, it needs to work with the integrated display adapter and all that jazz.
Ultimately more cost, and thus less interest. While some Apple types might salivate over the prospect of one cable that goes from a laptop to a monitor, and then a bunch of non-monitors ports on that monitor, most people don't care.
note: jedidiah is a gnu/hippie who's angry that Apple took-over the *nix desktop market.
In any case, Thunderbolt has been out for two years now and the peripheral selection is pretty pathetic. Apple has an expensive monitor/docking station. Belkin's docking station has been "coming soon" forever now. And there's some drive enclosures, and that's abou tit.
The Belkin and Matrox docks have been out for a while now. The Belkin dock was "Temporarily out of stock" at Amazon despite the $299 price tag the last time I checked I checked (about 60 seconds ago). There are no drive enclosures available (unfortunately), only ready made external drives which only make sense if you have an SSD to really take advantage of Thunderbolt's speed and a capacity of at least 128gb which makes them extra expensive. Buying a Thunderbolt enabled mechanical drive only makes sense if you are stuck with a machine that has a Thunderbolt connector and USB2 connectors since you get no speed advantage to speak of over USB3. For my purposes external drives start getting interesting at 500gb since I use them mostly for backups and to store tons of photographs, Photoshop files and e-books. There is also a SATA adapter from Seagate (Although strangely enough no SSD disks), a string of really interesting and ridiculously expensive RAID solutions and a few adapters for FW800, GigaBit ethernet., Video etc... What is keeping Thunderbolt down is the price of high capacity SSDs and the fact you can't get any empty enclosures. As the price of SSDs starts to fall and mechanical disks go the way of the dodo (not shedding any tears) and Thunderbolt stands a good chance to compete with USB3 as long as it can keep a speed advantage because I'll buy what ever gets me as close to native SSD+SATA speeds as possible when I'm making large data transfers. Another thing to consider with Thunderbolt is that the display connector usually doubles as a Thunderbolt connector. Since some machines like the MacBook AIr only have one connector you'll either have to unplug the display every time you want to plug in a Thunderbolt device or put your display on the end of the daisy chain so never buy a TB device that does not support daisy chaining. The other option is to buy a machine with two TB ports like the MacBook Pro which is what I did. It's only marginally heavier than a MBA and has way more connector options.
Thunderbolt has 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 (this new version changes that to 3.0). 10gbps raw data rate, around 8gbps effective. It also has one channel of DisplayPort 1.1a.
So in terms of non-display devices, that means one RAID array of reasonably fast drives can easily overload it. I dunno about you, my RAID controllers usually hand of of 4-8x slots. 1 good SSD can kill half of that on its own. A 10 gig NIC is more than it can handle (look in the thread for a post by someone who implements those). In terms of display, DP 1.1a has enough bandwidth to get you 2560x1600@60fps. Knock on a second display at that rez? Well you don't have enough bandwidth anymore, so you are going to have to reduce rez, or framerate.
Or you could always, you know, have more than one connector and not bitch.
Seriously the one connector thing seems a little silly to me. A marketing solution looking for a problem. Yes, it'll work fine for the kind of stuff Apple likes to do: A laptop connected to a monitor, which then provides USB ports n' such, all over one connector. Ya. Great. Not really that big a deal.
It is not something, at least at present, that you can effectively hang a bunch of shit on one connector and get high performance.
I wish apple would realise this. I love mac pros and macbooks ,but they just are not the same sort of product and it feels like apple has forgotten about the humble mac pro.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
My desktop and 2 of my laptops are Lenovos. Up until this year my best/favorite devices. OpenSuse 12.3 and Windows 7 - 32bit & 64 bit.
I am writing this on a 3 week old MacPro 2.7 GHz, 512 Gb flash and 16 Gb ram ... and retina display. I'll be hooking it up today to an HP ZR30W so I get 2560x1600 AND 2880x1800 - my 50 year old eyes are in heaven. And I get more IOPs than my VPLEX or Nimble storage can deliver.
It is singularly the best workstation I have ever had in my life. And my experience covers everything from an Intel Z80 running CPM 30 years ago to racks of Sun Enterprise servers on Solaris 10. I used most of the AT&T 3B and the Amdahl stuff too. Lisa, Fat Macs and Multias were cool as well.
wanna dis it - sure, go ahead - you clearly don't own one. But its the best box I've ever had.
The Mac Pro is a niche system. It's designed for heavy duty multimedia and there is no such thing as enough Ram in that niche. Macbook Pro is good enough for everything else except maybe hardcore gamers that need to upgrade video cards every time a new one comes out.
nice to have a supercomputer laying around.
Or for people that like larger screens
Choose between 3 different sizes, or plug in an external monitor.
people who don't like apple's OS
Install a different OS if you want.
or for people who don't think a laptop should cost a month of a mortage.
They are actually priced right inline with other manufacturers laptops of the same quality. We're talking about business-grade Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc. laptops, not bargain basement Asus.
But that's neither here nor there, carry on with your status symbols.
Ah, here we go. The personal bias comes out in your post, reflecting why you'd post so much misinformation to begin with.
I know Mac hardware isn't for everyone but really that post just sounds like blatant envy.
Or for people that like larger screens
Umm what? I can connect three separate screens directly into my (retina) macbook pro (2x displayport + 1x dvi). More with external thunderbolt PCIe breakout chassis' using more GPU's. One of the external screens I have connected has a resolution of 3840x2400, which is about as big as it gets resolution-wise.
The Mac Pro is a niche system.
All high-end PCs are niche systems.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.