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haravikk

macrumors 65816
May 1, 2005
1,499
21
is it publicly known what these requirements are? seems as if intel would be lenient/encouraging to get other manufacturers involved.. they're the ones placing the controllers on the motherboards but, as far as i can gather, they aren't making peripherals.. but they'll make money on every single thunderbolt device which is sold.
Not a clue, but it seems like prototype devices need to be sent for review, rather than manufacturers simply slapping in a controller and adhering to a few specifications, but this is seriously slowing down adoption, and also makes DIY parts impossible to come by.

For example, DATOptic did sell a Thunderbolt to SATA bridge that you could just connect to a SATA device (along with power) for an instant connection. Or you could slap it onto a PCI bracket and pop it in a computer case with a standalone SATA RAID controller to make your own Thunderbolt connected RAID array.
But right before I ordered one they seem to have pulled it, or are at least no longer offering it to consumers.

You likewise can't buy the ATTO Thunderstream 3808E Thunderbolt bridge, only the incredibly expensive boxed version, because they are forced to sell them to OEMs only, who must submit any devices based on the ATTO bridge to Intel (and Apple too, apparently) for review before they can go on sale.

I did however just read here that Intel has now begun a "Thunderbolt Ready" program for motherboard manufacturers to try to improve adoption through the use of PCIe cards either bundled with machines or added by users later on. It's a bit of a weird add-on though as you need a Display Port on your graphics card in order to provide Display Port for the Thunderbolt controller, but I don't see why you'd want to do that instead of just connecting your displays direct, leaving you with more Thunderbolt bandwidth.
 

slughead

macrumors 68040
Apr 28, 2004
3,107
237
I did however just read here that Intel has now begun a "Thunderbolt Ready" program for motherboard manufacturers to try to improve adoption through the use of PCIe cards either bundled with machines or added by users later on. It's a bit of a weird add-on though as you need a Display Port on your graphics card in order to provide Display Port for the Thunderbolt controller, but I don't see why you'd want to do that instead of just connecting your displays direct, leaving you with more Thunderbolt bandwidth.

If they keep on screwing over device makers like that, there will be no demand for Motherboard makers to make them compatible with the "thunderbolt ready" add-on card.

We'll see how it pans out, I'm not optimistic for TB the desktop market.

On a side note, I'm thoroughly enjoying my rMBP and almost even purchased a thunderbolt gigabit ethernet NIC!... Then I found a USB one half the price :(
 
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VirtualRain

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 1, 2008
6,304
118
Vancouver, BC
I video edit on a 2.66 Quad-Core 4,1 Mac Pro with the 4870 GPU that came with the Mac Pro when I bought it. If I just upgrade the GPU to the GTX 680 I won't see the gains that Barefeats has shown because I have an underpowered CPU?

Consider... the new Quad CPU is about twice as fast as your CPU, the SSD is 5x faster than your SATA2 ports, memory bandwidth is double, USB3 is up to 8x faster than your USB2 ports, and the D300 is several multiples faster than your GPU. So yeah, you could upgrade one or more of these parts and see some added performance, but at some point it just makes sense to upgrade the whole system.
 
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