While this looks very cool, traditional Hard drives will have a very hard time putting this to good use. Until SSD drives come way down in price, its usability in the home market will be very limited.
While this looks very cool, traditional Hard drives will have a very hard time putting this to good use. Until SSD drives come way down in price, its usability in the home market will be very limited.
better make flash drives faster :D
love a flash drive with 700 MB/sec transfer speed
why limit yourself to nand? why not consider memristors and such, what about the next next gen? thats where this is headed (hopefully)
Until all ports are replaced by lightpeak ports, this is just another interconnect solution. For that to work, one would probably need an agnostic transfer medium, a hardware level demuxer / muxer, and most importantly, software control to instantaneously implement new standards that new devices might need or introduce.
Now that they use a displayport cable, is that supported by default or would the TB cable need an adabter to connect from the computers port to a DP display? Or do we need new monitors with TB ports to use this?
thunderbolt is backwards compatible with displayport and displayport cables.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mech0z
thunderbolt itself uses thunderbolt cables.
could this be used for external VGAs with nvidia optimus or the Lucid software?
it could be interesting,
but apart from that is quite good to keep the connector compatible with the displayport, and there are many new possibilities, connecting many devices with decent performance through one cable
Already been implented in the new macbook pro's.. now its a matter to get this onto desktops!!
From Xbit -
AMD: Thunderbolt Is Just Another Proprietary Standard
Advanced Micro Devices, the second largest supplier of x86 microprocessors on the globe and the designer of half of the world's discrete graphics adapters, said that Intel Corp.'s recently introduced Thunderbolt input/output technology will become just another proprietary standard with not a lot of chances to be adopted widely. The chip designer also doubted that the TB actually brings any tangible improvements.
"Existing standards offer remarkable connectivity and together far exceed the 10Gb/s peak bandwidth of Thunderbolt. These solutions meet and exceed the bandwidth utilization of many peripherals," a spokesperson for AMD said.
AMD did not take part in the development of Thunderbolt technology and therefore will not be able to support it natively in the foreseeable future. In addition, the company does not see a lot of prospects for Thunderbolt in the short-term future as it does not substantially outperform current generation I/O technologies and sometimes even offers lower bandwidth. Coupled with the lack of devices that really take advantage of extreme throughput and the fact that Thunderbolt is a proprietary tech for now, the situation does not seem to be good for the interconnection.
"The DisplayPort1.2 standard offers up to 17Gb/s of peak bandwidth for displays. [...] Many AMD-based platforms support USB 3.0 which offers 4.8Gb/s of peak bandwidth, AMD natively supports SATA 6Gb/s with our 8-series chipsets. [Meanwhile], the total bandwidth stated for a Thunderbolt channel is only 20% higher than one PCI Express 3.0 lane and about 52% higher than a single USB 3.0 port," claimed the official for AMD.
The designer of graphics processors also pointed out that Thunderbolt uses the mini DisplayPort connector and that the solution [when actually utilized] essentially reduces bandwidth available for displays connected to the mDP port. For example, AMD recently announced a multi-stream technology with the Radeon HD 6800-series graphics cards that enables a single cable to link multiple displays for additional display flexibility employing AMD Eyefinity technology. Essentially, this multi-display tech if implemented into a laptop, will not be compatible with TB.
"Employing Thunderbolt in the DisplayPort connector implementation decreases the bandwidth available for DisplayPort reducing the bandwidth available for various multi-display configurations," stated the company.
Although manufacturers of external hard disk drives, such as Seagate Technologies and Western Digital, do support Thunderbolt and plan to introduce HDDs featuring the interconnector later this year, it is clear that only high-speed solid-state drives will be able to actually utilize 10Gb/s of bandwidth. In fact, there are generally no devices - apart from external graphics processors - that can use 10Gb/s of bandwidth over the PCI Express protocol. Moreover, graphics cards actually require more than 10Gb/s. All-in-all, the actual market prospects of Thunderbolt seem rather gloomy.
"Consumers generally benefit by having standard, high-speed ports available on their mobile devices. Proprietary ports, or the requirement of a dongle to employ those industry-standard ports may be an obstacle to consumers having the full computing experience at home or on the road," assumed the official for AMD.
Previously known as Light Peak, Thunderbolt technology supports two low-latency communications protocols - PCI Express for data transfer and DisplayPort for displays. Thunderbolt technology works on data streams in both directions, at the same time, so users get the benefit of full bandwidth in both directions, over a single cable. With the two independent channels, a full 10Gb/s of bandwidth can be provided for the first device in the chain of the devices. All Thunderbolt technology devices share a common Mini DisplayPort connector. Intel's Thunderbolt controllers interconnect a PC and other devices, transmitting and receiving packetized traffic for both PCIe and DisplayPort protocols and thus makers need to develop or use additional controllers to make their products compatible with the TB I/O interface.
Intel claims that the adoption rate of the new I/O technology will not be considerably limited. Still, it is aimed currently at professionals rather than on typical consumers.
"The combination of the very fast data transfer and beyond-HD display support on a single slender cable has great appeal for HD media creators, especially who work on laptops. Those same features also solve the big challenges posed by the growing HD media libraries many of us now own," a spokesman for Intel said last week.
Source
Pipe down, get back to your corner, and concentrate on your CPU/GPU's AMD. What connectors have you come up with as of late hmm o.O? Just cos Intel are making connectors. And Mobile SoC's. And basic Integrated video. And leading performance wise in currently released CPU's.
This connector will be awesome. As soon as it comes to fruition in Australia, I'm in :-)
knew amd was gonna jump in and call it all a fad
kinda makes sense too, since this new port is really not a new thing, but a fix to an issue that is quite minor (one port for all things)
given the probably high cost of having this port on products, either laptops or motherboards, i really dont care that i have an extra 2 wires going across my desk. and i dont think most of the world will either.
and AMD is right that displayport is suppose to be able to daisy chain aswell, which would suck if you cant do that using TB
If intel decides to put thunderbolt into there centrino platform and also on there mainstream desktop platform, it will be used widely, regardless if amd wants it or not.
Thats advantage of controlling more then 50% of the market.
But what I dislike is that there is no out of the box support for other protocols... imho that was the biggest advantage of lightpeak...
Need usb 3?..No problem LP can do it, need FW also no problem... with only DP and PCI-E its really only a extention then a repleacment for all other connection types...
That is indeed a disappointment. I still wish for a one for all connection solution.
[Edit]
Looks like it will be Thunderbolt in a combination with this --> http://www.tested.com/news/how-netwo...splayport/514/ , plus the other proprietary formats.
Further reading on HDBaseT can be found at the official site --> http://www.hdbaset.org/technology/what_is_hdbaset
i dont think this holds trueQuote:
Originally Posted by Hornet331
with this being new, its only on new machines. the time it takes for a good majority of machines to have it is looking like 3+ years. then we will see products using it.
i can understand some things like a monitor that could have this in addition to other ports. but what else would care to use it? a external HDD that will have usb, esata, then on top of it all, TB? those devises would be too few and too far away.
i dont see people wanting to eat the cost of something they wouldnt use for years. but a business i can kinda understand if they are trying to get all new tech, and intel provides all hardware with TB connections (like their SSDs).
question though, in the future would i expect my graphics card to have no TB port, but my motherboard will, and i dont have to plug my monitor into the gpu, bur rather the motherboard?
Same could be said about Usb3. Add in cards don't sell that much, and personally i would hate it to use a addin card for such a thing, plus this is only a option for desktops.
So in the notebook market it boils down to new units, and there intel has the leadership with ~85% marketshare of shiped untis each quartal. My original statement still remains valid, if intel decides to include TB in centrino 80% of all new books will have TB and in 2-3 years the majority of the market will have it. Amd is in that equation a nonfactor. In fact they even could use this to block amd from getting more marketshare, if they agressivly market TB as must have feature.
Regarding conection to the MB, whats the problem with that?
You already do this with all of the hybrid graphic solutions... :p:
USB3 is backwords compatible, you wouldnt notice you had it, and there is no worry if you make a device thats only 2.0 compliant, cause you know it will fit. i can expect people to see USB3 and pay the few dollars more for it. but with TB and intels goal to have everyone on it, the first few years will feel like a tax on the motherboard until devices use it. or if they even need it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hornet331
people get USB3 because they know its futureproofing and servers a current purpose. plus the cost seems to be about 10$ more for boards that come with sata6.0 and usb3, (i only know of the AMD board costs which seem very consistent in cost for that SB850 which has nicer usb/sata)
no problem at all, its actually a good thing since it means you may not need a gpu with the port if your motherboard already has it. (no idea if it would work)Quote:
Originally Posted by Hornet331
i also think they are still missing a huge thing by not providing serious power to external ports. there needs to be something that can provide 20-30W, useful for things like powering a monitor external hard drive, or charging more than just a cellphone. i cant stand how so many little things that need their own power brick that you cant loose or else its a dead product. that kind of port would impress me.
Current implemention of TB can supply 10W which is already nearly tripple the ammount of what usb 3.0 can deliver (3,6W) and 4,5 times that of usb 2.0 (2,2W), and I bet they could deliver more if they would have stuck with the original fiber approach and copper for the power.
Also TB has already been speced for fiber form the beginning and 100Gb/s was the original spec, the 10Gb/s is a lower cost alternative so if the first itteration "only" has 10gb/s and will followed by a 100gb/s version, I take it over usb 3.0 any day.
10w is an improvement, but still nothing that will change the world.
i better see alot of external enclosures for HDD and blue rays that get power solely from the port.
Also, in contrast to appels FW back then intel charges no licens or per port fee. If you buy the controller, you can build a device. Hell i bet with a bit of a work around some mobo makers could even get amd boards to work with TB, cause all it needs is a connection to the pci-e bus and to the displayport io of the gpu...
Forget USB 3.0. Give us Thunderbolt devices that are powered by Pikachu's very own electricity!
I would love it if computers only needed 1 cable and one connector type to hook everything up. It would make things a lot cleaner and a lot simpler when it comes to setting up computers.