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Next-Gen Thunderbolt: Twice as Fast, But a Different Connector
Details have leaked about the next iteration of Intel's Thunderbolt connector. The good news: bandwidth will double, going up to about 40Gbps from its current 20. Power usage will drop by half, and it'll support PCI-e 3.0. The bad news: it uses a redesigned connector, and will rely on adapters for backward compatibility. From the article:
"Doubling the available bandwidth will enable next-generation Thunderbolt controllers to drive two 4K displays simultaneously, where current controllers can only drive one. The new controllers will allegedly be compatible with a variety of other protocols as well, including DisplayPort 1.2, USB 3.0, and HDMI 2.0. Intel will offer two different versions of the controller—a version that uses four PCI Express lanes to drive two Thunderbolt ports and an "LP" (presumably "Low Power") version that uses two PCI Express lanes to drive one port."
Whaddya mean it's not the 80's anymore?
I read you can use a simple dongle for backward comparability, so it doesn't seem too bad.
Why is it everything apple embraces early ends up being a constantly changing connector
The 10 people affected by this bus imrovement went out to celebrate but were hit by a car going twice the speed limit.. Oh the humanity!
Seriously though, I like to consider my needs a non-professional leading on the bleeding edge (2x 2560x1440's) But I don't even own a thunderbolt port, and unless some amazing peripherals come along to change my use case, I don't see that changing soon.
All I want is:
1. standard bus standard which can drive anything
2. said connector/cabling comes in 3 sizes from really really tiny cell phone variety to honking large clicking in connector that can't break
3. That is future expandible to whatever for the next 10 years minimum
4. No IP which prevents competition in said space except for standards bodies who's potfolios are both fair and unbiased in licensing terms
Addendum I. Monster cables is specifically banned from ever producing said cables for ever
Nice to have's
5. Fibre option
6. Broadcast based networking support
7. Bus QOS control
8. Standard descriptive naming (NO BS marketing names like super-speed, hyper-active speed, high definition bandwidth, etc. )
9. Support host wake/power-on
10. Support at least bi-directional communications so I can plug in Bluetooth/IR/Wifi/etc.. message receivers and have if not chipset, at least OS support for pluggable and routable support for input methods without BS proprietary support all over the place
Bye!
That means a single cable to hook up your laptop and drive devices, video and receive power. Finally.
Now all 2 mfr of thunderbolt products will have to retool for the next useless plug. I hope the iCable is only available from the Mac store for $299 for the 3" version. If you actually want a length long enough to connect to your monitor, well, that doesn't exist.
Is Intel *TRYING* to kill off Thunderbolt? They can't make up their mind if they want USB 3.X or Thunderbolt to be their next-gen connection, and now (despite extremely low Thunderbolt adoption), they're going to change the connector?
USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt are redundant. At this point, they even both support uncompressed video. Pick one, drop (or deprecate) support for the other, and the industry will migrate.
The adoption rate has been lukewarm at best and yet they come up with a replacement that is incompatible with the existing version and still incredibly expensive. Way to kill before it is even born intel. Hint if you want to copy apple lock in money grabbing model you first must make the product a success before squeezing the punters balls for more juice.
The article does not list "extended range" among the advantages, so I guess they are not switching over to the optical thunderbolt. Too bad, I think that would be a much bigger advantage than the 2x speedup (my MacBook already has 2 thunderbolt2 connectors). If optical thunderbolt ever catches on you could use it to attach multiple terminals to a computer, such as routing uncompressed low-latency video signals throughout your home. Last I checked, there still is not a good way to do this over gigabit ethernet.
It's about that big f*** gun what sticks out the front.
oh wait...
Plus, the idea of defining a "cabling" for the consumer market where every cable is on its own with regards to how it implements the physical layer is a very bad idea. It renders cables terribly expensive and you cannot be sure that the cable from vendor A will work well with the socket from vendor B.
The thing is USB doesn't have DMA. This is on purpose, it allows for cheaper devices and is more secure. However it means everything has to go through the CPU. So higher load, higher latency. Thunderbolt is just PCIe (and display) so it is as low latency and impact as a card in the system.
For lots of usages, the difference doesn't matter, but for heavy hitting stuff it can.
A single mode fiber allows for Tbps, over significantly longer distances than any electrical high speed communication, and fits into a connector as tiny as you can make them. Add two copper wires for power and then leave it alone for at least a decade.
I think Intel has given up trying to compete directly with USB. Instead, they're pumping thunderbolt to be as fast as it can possibly go, for people who care more about performance than cost.
I can't think of any other reason why they'd be pushing performance so hard while prices are still so absurd that no consumer in their right mind would purchase them if there is a USB equivalent to be had.
> I'm not sure there's anything that USB does that Thunderbolt can't do
Thunderbolt does PCIe and USB, so there is nothing USB can do that Thunderbolt can't. If there were, Thunderbolt would do it via USB.
Thunderbolt is basically PCIe + USB + HDMI + power, all on the same cable.
> Last I checked, there still is not a good way to do this over gigabit ethernet.
HDbaseT is the standard for HDMI over CAT6. Several vendors support it, sometimes branding it with their own name.
As an alternative, boosted HDMI cables are good up to about 50 feet or so, depending on resolution.
Using boosted cabling, a 4X4 HDMI matrix will let you connect four sources to four receivers.
HDbaseT will connect (at least) one source to multiple displays. I'm not sure if HDbaseT works for multiple sources without a matrix box.
You can find matrices and HDbaseT for about $130 now. You'll also see roughly similar, older equipment being sold for $3,000. There's been a huge price drop, kind of like enterprise grade wide SCSI cards are still expensive, though consumer level SATA hardware outperforms it for 1/10th the price.
I thought the EU outlawed innovations like this. Wasn't everything supposed to have the same connector? RS-232, I think it was.
I, for one, am excited about this new super-fast connector for which all the peripherals will be too expensive to buy. I know that when firewire was being replaced by Thunderbolt, I was worried that they may do away with the chaining that means any hard drive case or breakout unit which doesn't have a pass-through becomes a dead end. Now, with this new Thunderbolt I can be comfortable in the knowledge that there will still be a whole array of amazing devices all of which are too expensive for me to possibly want to buy.
(Note: Thunderbolt is great for some people, but those people are probably the ones that have the company paying for the extra displays and drives)
HDbaseT 1.0 included RS-232, which could be used for keyboard and mouse. HDbaseT 2.0 includes USB over the same cable.
However, if computer terminals are what you want, not top quality video, there are better options. Obviously there are things like VNC and RDP. I buy and sell Raritan IP KVMs, which I use in my datacenter. The KVMs give full control, from BIOS to GUI, over the internet. HDbaseT is targeted at entertainment video - lots of motion, and high quality video.
I've been studying the HDMI options intensely for just a few days for a project I'm working on - connecting a computer to two large TV sets 80 feet away at my church. (Plus another one 15' away).
Any chance we'll see external video cards now?
eSata was....... nevermind.
All devices which require specific hardware controllers always become "specialist" products (firewire).
All devices which are cheap and utilize existing CPU cycles become "mainstream" products (usb).
If only they could make a separate, standardized hardware controller. I dunno, similar to Audio/Video which powers and processes the required area on a dedicated chip.
USB is close, but if we could replace the CPU load to a dedicated hardware controller, we'd be laughing.
Is this not just USB vs FireWire again?
Or com vs. parallell, ide vs scsi, etc?
Two types, one for personal and for profressional.
One is cheap, the other is fast
Thanks for that info. Do yyou know if that cable is boosted or unboosted cable? It can be hard to tell. For 75', it's probably boasted.
From my research, it seems that at that distance, some displays are sometimes able to sync with some sources, using some cables, in some environments. A different source, a different display, or new sources of interference may cause it to stop working. Sometimes it'll work for a while, then require restarting in a certain order. For my purpose, it needs to work every time, without me being there to suggest restarting things or deal with a dimmer that's causing interference.
Why? 1.3 is supposed to be coming Q2 2014. It wouldn't hurt to wait a bit, would it (and the likely already have all the required details anyway)?
Ok, I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand the whole mess.
Hdmi is supposed to be the connector that transfers audio and video to your TV, it has some additional features like ethernet over hdmi and other features.
Displayport is supposed to be the connector that transfters audio and video to your monitor, it has more bandwidth than hdmi, which I take to mean that it can support all the other hdmi features and more.
Thunderbolt is the one connector to rule them all: Displayport, usb, sata and pci-e can be done over it.
From this it seems that HDMI Displayport Thunderbolt. So why aren't all TVs nowadays running displayport and thunderbolt ports? Why are we stuck with HDMI?
Miso tink adapters da balls!
Thunderbolt doesn't do USB, however the fact that it does PCIe means that you can run a USB controller on the other end. You wouldn't want a Thunderbolt mouse, because it would require sticking a USB controller in the mouse as well as a Thunderbolt interface and a load of PCIe bus logic. USB is nice because the client component is relatively simple and can be made very cheap. It's also nice because there are a number of standard higher-level protocols built on top of it (e.g. HID for keyboards, mice and so on, DUN for things that look a bit like modems). Thunderbolt doesn't replace USB, it's the connection that you use between your laptop and the display or docking station that has all of the USB devices plugged into it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You should explain all that to the people who wrote the VESA standard, because they think they used 4 lanes of PCIe-capable pairs AND a lower bandwidth aux channel on pin 15 and pin 17 that can speak USB. The display part of Thunderbolt is DisplayPort. DisplayPort has always had the USB channel. Technically, that channel COULD be used for something other than USB, but on all implementations I've ever seen it's broken out into USB plug.
VESA publishes a very nice document called "Overview of DisplayPort" that explains it pretty well in just 40 pages. It's a good thing to read if you want to have some understanding of the protocol. It's suggested that you know something about it before arguing about it.
Thunderbolt does PCIe and USB, so there is nothing USB can do that Thunderbolt can't.
It cant do CHEAP = will fail like FW.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I never had an issue with that cable. It is quite large gage that must help. I don't have an external, powered, booster. However there is some sort of filter at the TV's end. The cable is not supposed to be reversed.
1) Power and data do not belong on the same connector or cable.
Bullshit they don't. Power and data should be on the same cable unless there is a compelling technical reason for them not to be. A big part of the appeal of USB is specifically because it can carry both data and power over the same cable. Why on earth would I want a separate power connector if I don't have to have one?
2) Extra pins cost more up front, but make backward compatibility less of a pain down the road.
Extra pins are not usually the problem when it comes to making a serial connection faster. Your point is valid but universally so.
Even as shitty and useless as it started out, USB has put all of these to shame.
USB carries both power and data on the same cable and recent versions have more pins than the original. Want to try that argument again when you have set your double standards for Apple vs everyone else aside?
That said USB3 is pretty good.
Pretty good? I could go with that. But it could be better:
1) Should be able to carry more power
2) The connectors still suck, especially the mini/micro versions - doubly so for the USB 3 micro.
Because my brand new ethernet connector is gone until I reboot.
No they are not. They overlap in functionality but they are not the same.
Same argument was made for USB vs Firewire and we know how that turned out. Firewire was objectively better in a lot of ways but USB won because it was cheaper and good enough. Nobody except Apple supports Thunderbolt really so even if USB 3/3.1 is flawed I think it is going to win that standards battle.
Yes it does support uncompressed video but how well it does so far does not seem as though it is as good as TB.
Doesn't have to be "as good as" it just needs to be good enough. USB is a great example of a "good enough" technology. It's not perfect but it generally gets the job done and everyone has it.
For most consumers, USB 3.1 will be fine for most applications. For professionals, they are likely to get TB devices for their needs.
In the short run you are probably correct. In the long run I think Thunderbolt is likely to be a niche standard like Firewire.
I do the same thing with a USB 3 cable. I drive two monitors, an external hard drive, keyboard, trackball, a USB 3 hub and gig-ethernet. Could do a printer too. All by plugging in one USB 3 cable. My laptop has USB 3 and doesn't have Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is external PCIe. Don't knock it until you realize how useful it can be.
Technologically Thunderbolt is great. Problem is that only Apple supports it in any meaningful way and USB 3+ is generally good enough for most people.
If I want low latency high quality audio card, I'm not plugging it into USB.
You and the 5 other people that care about that.
They're two different use cases.
Yeah see, they really aren't. You're not thinking of the problem in the abstract. They both transport some amount of data and/or power from point A to point B. How mechanically it gets there is something that the user generally doesn't care about and shouldn't have to. Yes there are some advantages to each one for certain use cases but most of the functionality overlaps heavily. Most people are eventually going to go with the more widely accepted standard and that is USB.
Thunderbolt is likely to remain a niche just like Firewire and SCSI before it. Great technologies that will lose the standards battle to a cheaper good enough technology.
...all of which will be incompatible or require adapters for the new thunderbolt spec.
> However there is some sort of filter at the TV's end. The cable is not supposed to be reversed.
That sounds like the boosted cables I've seen. HDMI provides the power for a buffer/ booster at the display end. Where did you find it for $45?
Looks like Apple is doing its best to emulate the winning practices of Nokia, famous for creating a new connector for every model change.
And we know how well that worked out for them!
Thunderbolt doesn't do USB,
The new version does.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
What on earth are you talking about in this little rant? DisplayPort? If so, you really ought to go read that "Overview of DisplayPort" document you cited, because you sure aren't talking about anything in it.
DP has 4 lanes of PCIe capable pairs? No, that's not a good way to think about DP at all. The DP physical layer is not the same as PCIe's. The only immediately obvious commonality is that both DP and PCIe 1.x/2.x use 8b10b line coding, but that tech wasn't original to PCIe and is used in countless things which are not PCIe.
The DP aux channel is actually USB, and always has been? Nope. Not even close. The DP 1.2 AUX channel got a speed boost to 720 Mbps, and a few protocol extensions allowing it to encapsulate Ethernet and/or USB packets alongside its native function (which is to allow a display source to probe the bus topology and display devices). That capability doesn't mean it's natively USB, or even that this USB tunneling capability has always been present (it hasn't).
And in another combative, wrongheaded post, you claimed that Thunderbolt is "basically PCIe + USB + HDMI + power, all on the same cable". Nope. Thunderbolt is Thunderbolt data + power, on the same cable. Thunderbolt data is a very high speed, low latency packet switched network, one which is designed to act as an encapsulation layer for DisplayPort and PCI Express packets (both of which are also packet switched networks).
In principle, Thunderbolt can transport any type of packet, and I believe this has already been done. E.g., Apple added support for Thunderbolt networking in recent OS X releases, and this is undoubtedly something along the lines of encapsulating Ethernet frames in Thunderbolt packets.
Thunderbolt has no designed-in provisions for transporting HDMI, and supporting HDMI would not be as straightforward as Ethernet, DP, or PCIe since HDMI is a streaming interface (one where the stream clock is the pixel clock used by the display device) rather than a packet system. Although it is obviously possible in principle, the Thunderbolt protocol also has no designed-in provisions for transporting USB. So far as I know, every Thunderbolt device which appears to do USB over TB is actually using TB as a PCIe link to connect an off the shelf PCIe USB host controller chip to your computer.
"It's suggested that you know something about it before arguing about it." -- those are words you should heed.