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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."
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.
Why is it everything apple embraces early ends up being a constantly changing connector
Because they can sell new ones at 60$ a piece and pocket the 55+$ in profit every year or so, putting in code that tells if it is "genuine Apple" or not?
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.
Why is it everything apple embraces early ends up being a constantly changing connector
Because they're not averse to giving backward compatibility the finger. I'm not saying it's good or bad and naturally there's always the exception (USB) that proves the rule. I say proves, but your assertion was pretty dubious in the first place... almost as if you saw an opportunity to complain about Apple just to provoke a reaction, some might say.
Yes, because there's nothing like paying $2000 for a laptop that only weighs 2 lbs, except you have to carry 15lbs worth of adapters around with you.
1) Power and data do not belong on the same connector or cable.
2) Extra pins cost more up front, but make backward compatibility less of a pain down the road.
The list of interconnection technologies that have failed on these two points is large, especially in Apple-land. Firewire and (now) Thunderbolt are the obvious ones, but there are others. SCSI was a virtually non-stop clusterfuck of pin-out changes for the better part of two decades.
Even as shitty and useless as it started out, USB has put all of these to shame.
Then again, Ethernet had its growing pains too. Anyone remember thicknet taps? An office full of those looked like a bunch of rats gnawing on a giant turd.
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.
At least it sounds like they have an actual reason this time. They didn't used to bother explaining it. It was just
Apple: Here's your new phone, and you'll want to buy a new cord too.
Customer: Oh no thanks, I have the old one.
Apple: That one won't work anymore, the new one is $40!
Customer: Wait, why won't it work? It's exactly the same.
Apple: It's incompatible with the new phone.
Customer: It IS compatible! See, I can plug it in!.. and it's telling me it's not compatible?
Apple: Yes, because it's incompatible.
Customer: Why is it incompatible!?! It fits and carries electricity still!
Apple: Because when you plug it in, the phone tells you it's incompatible and stops itself from charging... duh...
Customer: This seems like you artificially made the phone incompatible with old cords just to nickle and dime me for new accessories!
Apple: No sir, it costs forty dollars, not fifteen cents.
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.
Who the hell mods this stuff up? The Apple 30 pin connector was around for NINE YEARS! Old cables worked with the brand new iPhone 4S. No problem. Phones and devices got smaller, and technology had improved beyond needing 30 pins, so they came out with an additional connector (Lightning). The cables were $20 at launch, not $40, and cheaper ones can be found now.
If every iPhone had a different charger, the above comment would be fine, but using 2 chargers over the life of a product isn't bad.
Well I would think that looking at where the connector was and seeing that it was taking up a lot of space that could have been used for other things like bigger speakers. I mean it doesn't take a genius to see the comparison. Also yes whatever you get from Apple: memory, HDs, cables, etc will be cheaper than you can get elsewhere and in the beginning only Apple was going to have the cables. You can get them at places like monoprice now for much cheaper.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Just to offer a factual counterpoint to this rather common narrative, the old 30-pin connector was around from the third-gen iPod in 2003 to the iPhone 4S, which was on sale until last year. Various websites offer third-party 30-pin cables for under $2 shipped, and the old ones continued to work right up until the connector was retired last year, when the iPhones 4S ceased being on sale.
The Lightning connector, which replaced it, can be purchased from Amazon and Monoprice for (as you'd expect) a fraction of what Apple charges, and the only Lightning cables that have stopped working are unlicensed ones. The reason that matters is because there have been cases of a few people in China being electrocuted to death by faulty, knock-off chargers and cables. Apple implemented the firmware restrictions on knock-off cables shortly thereafter.
Given that that's the sole connector change in their handheld devices during that time and that all of the cables--aside from some potentially dangerous knock-off ones--have remained functional the entire time, I think it should be obvious that they're not being unreasonable in how often they change out the connector.
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.
It's not funny, they did almost the exact same thing when overnight everything stopped charging via the firewire pins on the dock connector, leaving most docks unable to charge iStuff without adapters.
GP was probably referring to the chargers changing between iPod, iPhone and iPad. Same 30 pin cable but the iPhone and iPad would refuse to charge off of older iPod chargers. "Charging is not supported with this accessory". Especially problematic with 3rd party chargers.
> 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, 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)
The iPad in particular wants more amperage than older standard iPod/iPhone chargers can supply; it's part of having a larger, more power-hungry screen. It'd be better if all their chargers were identically specced, though.
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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).
And of course the charger had to change as those new devices which much bigger batteries needed a much gruntier supply to charge them in a reasonable amount of time. At least Apple's chargers are backwards compatible, so you can charge all your old devices with the latest charger as long as you keep your old cables.
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.
Yeah but it should still charge, albeit more slowly. That's a reasonable person's expectations for backwards compatability.
The new iPad air flat out refuses to charge on anything other than a 12W supply with the correct signalling voltages.
or perhaps its not a comment on the iphone, perhaps it refers to SCSI, firewire, ADB, the various charge connectors for laptops over the years.
so yes apple used 1 connector for 9years , however its not a 'standard that apple embraced' its a proprietary connector they created.
The funny thing is that all of those were objectively better in performance than what PCs were using, with the (possible) exception of USB. Apple never went for the cheap option just for the sake of being cheap, but the rest of the industry never followed whole-heartedly, so Apple ended up with tech that died, except for niches.
USB is the one that Apple dove into and somehow (probably because of the promise of cheap peripherals) got PC makers to go along. The charge was led by Apple.
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.
I believe the adapter will weigh much less than 15lbs.
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)?
Yes, USB is the bastion of stability with only 6 different plug types.
So, since '95, when USB 1.0 first was introduced, they've come up with 6 different plugs.
For comparison, Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, and since then, there have been 3 plugs for it.
The first was a standard Firewire 400 plug.
The second, a 30 pin plug
The third, the lightning connector.
Clearly, Apple is just going crazy changing the connector all the time.
Firewire: 3 connectors [4 and 6 pin for FW 400, 9 pin for FW 800].
Crazy.
And I guess you reject USB as well for providing power. Especially those crazy portable DVD writers, which come with dual-USB plugs, just so they can suck enough power to work.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
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1) Power and data do not belong on the same connector or cable.
2) Extra pins cost more up front, but make backward compatibility less of a pain down the road.
USB has put all of these to shame.
I don't understand - USB has power and data on the same cable and a minimal pin configuration.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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.
There aren't many high-speed peripheral connection formats that don't have a bunch of ridiculous plugs once they're sufficiently popular. USB has tons of plugs because it wasn't made with devices like thin smartphones in mind and thin phones would look extremely stupid with a huge USB B-type connector on the bottom. Thunderbolt doesn't have this problem because no one beyond small niches uses it but Apple. If I don't own Apple products or need to connect niche hardware meant to only work with Apple computers, Thunderbolt is absolute garbage to me and I'd rather have a USB 3.0 connector.
The biggest enemy of a better way is an existing one that is good enough. I wish I remembered where that quote I paraphrased came from.
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.
The charge was led by Apple.
No, it wasn't. Apple wasn't part of the group that developed USB, and tried hard not to support it for a long time. I have a 3rd gen iPod that can't even transfer files over USB, you must use Firewire.
What really made USB popular was when USB 2.0 hit, and again Apple had nothing to do with it. PC manufacturers started adding more USB ports and it became easier to attach a number of devices. Who would attach a keyboard and mouse when their machine only had two USB ports? HP in particular was one of the companies that helped develop USB 2.0, and they started moving to USB keyboards and mice as standard around then too.
Apple's biggest contribution was getting rid of the floppy drive in preference of Firewire/USB drives. They themselves tried to push Firewire for drives though, refusing to add USB compatibility to their storage peripherals until iPod compatibility with PCs forced them to. That was around 2003/4 IIRC, very late to the game.
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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.
What really made USB popular was when USB 2.0 hit, and again Apple had nothing to do with it. PC manufacturers started adding more USB ports and it became easier to attach a number of devices. Who would attach a keyboard and mouse when their machine only had two USB ports? HP in particular was one of the companies that helped develop USB 2.0, and they started moving to USB keyboards and mice as standard around then too.
What really made USB popular was that it was cheap shit. There was practically no licensing cost on the interface, and all you needed was a few pennies worth of host-driven IO. When it makes no difference to your bottom line, of course you put a dozen of the fuckers on a machine. Your mouse and keyboard really need no significant performance, so who cares if it's on a slow, CPU-hungry interface, and even things like (consumer grade) scanners and printers benefit more from a small, hot-attachable plug than they do from a hardware driven interface.
When you start trying to use it for storage, or cameras, or network interfaces, or monitors, or anything with any real data rate, now the cheap shittiness of the interface of the interface rears its ugly head, but it's too late, because it's already the pervasive peripheral interconnect. This is why Apple was trying to hold out with Firewire over USB
Thunderbolt is absolute garbage to me and I'd rather have a USB 3.0 connector.
The issue is that Thunderbolt is really not a peripheral connector, but a dock connector, or external data bus. Its intended purpose is to connect your laptop to a device (or maybe a monitor) that offers a range of static ports, so you do not need to plug them all in individually. It was never supposed to be a direct competitor to USB.
> 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?
You do realize that Intel controls the spec right? That alone defeats your argument.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yet every single device in my house (by half a dozen different manufacturers), with the sole exception of those made by Apple, uses a single USB plug to connect and charge. Explain that.
Even as shitty and useless as it started out, USB has put all of these to shame.
USB, which... has power and data on the same connector and cable, and also had to add more pins in a new connector because it didn't have enough up front?
The charge was led by Apple.
I have a 3rd gen iPod that can't even transfer files over USB, you must use Firewire.
Bullshit. It can't charge over USB - and that's because back than USB couldn't deliver enough power. Do you have to prove your lunacy in every Apple related discussion?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Firewire: 3 connectors [4 and 6 pin for FW 400, 9 pin for FW 800].
Crazy.
Don't forget that Sony brought us the (unpowered) 4-pin "i.LINK" connector, not Apple.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
That was the standard 4 pin port, only Sony didn't want to use the 'Firewire' trademark.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That was the standard 4 pin port, only Sony didn't want to use the 'Firewire' trademark.
Close, that was designed by Sony and added to the spec in the second edition - IEEE 1394a-2000. As opposed to the (almost completely) Apple designed IEEE 1394-1995.
I repeat: Apple had nothing to do with the 4-pin Firewire port and most of all never used it.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
For comparison, Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, and since then, there have been 3 plugs for it. The first was a standard Firewire 400 plug. The second, a 30 pin plug The third, the lightning connector.
Those Apple connectors are used for only a handful of their own devices - all of similar form and function.
USB? Tens of thousands of different devices with all manner of shapes, sizes and purpose.
Steve's RDF still working from beyond the grave, I see!
So be fair and count all those different cables made for one product with an USB connector on one side and a proprietary connectors on the other. And none of those were made before USB was able to be used for charging something like an iPod.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
No, the easiest explanation would be that you have been living under a rock for the last 5 years, and missed the wholesale migration to micro-USB.
Thunderbolt doesn't do USB,
The new version does.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Okay liar, tell me about how you charge your electrical toothbrush with USB. Or your notebook. Or that with "every single device" you actually meant "every single device with micro-USB."
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Way to ignore the context of the conversation. Are you autistic, by chance?
So you go with the "what I said is not what I meant" defense. Figures. Oh BTW, all Apple "devices" use a USB Plug to connect and charge too. Just not on the device. And in that they are exactly like most of the devices you were talking about, because neither uses STANDARD USB for charging. Because that would be too fucking slow.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.