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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?
That's simply false. There's a large amount of Thunderbolt accessories, including video gear, PCIe expansion chassis (very useful for laptops), and docks. Sonnet just announced this Thunderbolt dock, which seems to be a pretty great deal for laptops.
--Joakim Ziegler
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
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.
... 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.
Because 10GBe doesn't expose PCI to your peripherals
How about ExpEther technology virtualizes PCI Express over Ethernet.
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.
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.
It exists so that users of portable machines can plug in high speed peripherals. Not single external hard drives, but arrays, fibre channel, external GPUs, etc.
Most users don't do that.
I feel you have misstated the case by way of apologia. Most portable machines powerful enough to be worth plugging in anything more than a single storage device have more than just one port, so users don't need to plug everything into one port. Using a single cable would be a cool feature, but of the vanishingly few people plugging arrays into laptops, vanishingly few of them need a single cable. Slightly more are willing to pay for the privilege and save a few seconds they weren't going to use anyway, but still not enough to justify the cost of the feature.
The simple truth is that you can build a whole storage server on GigE for less than the cost difference to buy a machine with thunderbolt and external devices. That means it's overpriced, full stop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
nice to have a supercomputer laying around.
I know Mac hardware isn't for everyone but really that post just sounds like blatant envy.