Intel Says Fiber Optic Thunderbolt Cables Coming Later This Year

[xinu]

Great but what about the transceivers on each end to make it useful?

like a 50m Displayport cable $1299 on amazon

Edit: Also found 15m Displayport (non-optical) ~$160
15m 10G Ethernet ~$180

The little DSP I/O chips in the connectors cost maximum 1,50 USD each end. That would make 3 USD / cable so the 2 meter Cable costs for Apple arouund 4-5 dollars.

10 times profit for 2 metres of copper or fibre channel cable.

I it is really a shame that the richest IT company in the world has to RIP OFF their so beloved customers. "Here in Apple, we care"

Yeh they care, ABOUT YOUR MONEY

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I think someone beat me to the punch on this one, but price out the QSFP+ connectors for both ends of that $0.80/m cable and you might start to realize how cheap Thunderbolt is.

Well mr smart guy tell us? How much those DSP I/O chips costs? A dollar? Two? Ten dollars each?

Do you know how much it costs to manufacture an ARM A5 chip? I do. Do you?
Do you realize, that A5 chip is 1000x more complex than that Intel LightPeak DSP Chip?

 

[Mackan]

An external gpu would change everything. Someone would no longer require an internal gpu and would make hot swapping affordable and user friendly. It would be good for the environment (fewer obsolete computers), easier make a long term decision on a computer, and generally upscale the practical value of all computers.

Not to mention it would be a huge win for Intel and Apple. Tons of people would want this tech for having the all in one portable laptop with the power to run serious 3d. Affordable and more portable at least than the existing internal gpu laptops.

What you mentioned would only be good for the consumer and environment. I am sure companies like Intel and Apple wouldn't like it, because they want the tech to become obsolete as fast as possible, making people upgrade as often as possible.

In other words, what companies want is never good for the environment or your wallet. So I bet you won't see any widespread external GPU solutions suddenly. I bet you'll see an abscence of them, as always.

 

[xinu]

What you mentioned would only be good for the consumer and environment. I am sure companies like Intel and Apple wouldn't like it, because they want the tech to become obsolete as fast as possible, making people upgrade as often as possible.

In other words, what companies want is never good for the environment or your wallet. So I bet you won't see any widespread external GPU solutions suddenly. I bet you'll see an abscence of them, as always.

Wrong. If someone can make profit of external GPU's someone will do it. No matter how much Intel or Apple refuses the idea.

Windows users will have this technic available as demoed on MacBookPro with Windows 7. And if Apple OS X wont, well. Goodbye then. It was a short but interesting experience

Apple iOS products are major gaming platform these days. But still Apple wont extend the gaming business to the desktop.. Why? Gaming is bigger business than Music - TV and movies COMBINED

 

[Exhale]

Windows users will have this technic available as demoed on MacBookPro with Windows 7.

They've actually been demo'd for longer than that, using the Expresscard slot.

 

[gnasher729]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

Thunderbolt has a stupid name, your average user has no idea what it does. There are few useful or generally affordable peripherals and the whole thing is a mess. I cannot see Thunderbolt lasting long or being widely adopted.

Right now, there are monitors - clearly usable and affordable. There is one monitor that serves as a hub - clearly usable and affordable, and I would expect more of these. Owners of the various MacBooks are a considerable number of people who can afford and who often want a decent monitor with lots of added functionality. And the store where I usually buy electronic stuff sells a 4 TB / 4 way RAID and 12 TB / 6 way RAID drive with Thunderbolt connector at decent prices. Not cheap, but affordable.

 

[philipma1957]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

Thunderbolt has a stupid name, your average user has no idea what it does. There are few useful or generally affordable peripherals and the whole thing is a mess. I cannot see Thunderbolt lasting long or being widely adopted.

My favorite predication was the one I made for the iPad.

"looks like a tweener product too big to carry around and too small to see a good picture for a movie. What is Steve thinking?"

 

[JonB3Z]

LOL, what a failure thunderbolt is becoming. All this hype and time.... where are devices for consumers?

Have any of you;

- seen anyone having a thunderbolt device?
- seen a thunderbolt device on a store shelf?

Yes -- I have one on my desk. In fact, it's the main storage I'm using for my iMac.

No -- Because I hardly ever go into a store.

 

[RobQuads]

One good number to gauge the adoption rate of a new interface is ports shipped. Apple has shipped 17.8m Macs, Only 30m USB 3.0 controllers were shipped in the first 18 months

Not sure I agree thats a good guage of adoption rates. Just because something is sold with it in doesn't mean its used. The number of peripherals would be a much better guage.

I've got a 2011 Air with TB but I certainly don't use it. But I do use USB3 in my hackintosh with my £10 USB3 cradle.

TB will stay an premium product just like FW except this time it has a much stronger competitor in USB3 in terms of fullfilling the requirement of a lot of users i.e. speed.

 

[mijail]

The little DSP I/O chips in the connectors cost maximum 1,50 USD each end. That would make 3 USD / cable so the 2 meter Cable costs for Apple arouund 4-5 dollars.

10 times profit for 2 metres of copper or fibre channel cable.

I it is really a shame that the richest IT company in the world has to RIP OFF their so beloved customers. "Here in Apple, we care"

Yeh they care, ABOUT YOUR MONEY

A 80 kg person is made of about 60 litres water, some kg of carbon, and some fistfuls of iron, calcium and other thingies. So, I should be able to buy such a person for, say, 50$. Right?

Or, wine is 95% water. Why should I have to pay so much for it?

And don't get me started on perfumes!

 

[ncaissie]

That's bound to happen once PC manufacturers start putting them into their products, which should rapidly ramp up the scale and adoption of Thunderbolt. Hopefully that happens sooner than later, or it will end up like Firewire, if not worse off.

As for Firewire, I don't expect any new Macs coming out (except for a potential Mac Pro refresh) to support it natively any more. Most likely it will be done through a Thunderbolt->Firewire adapter. (And I suspect it won't be cheap).

The PC world didn't take to Firewire what makes you think they will adopt thunderbolt?

 

[k4jbd]

The little DSP I/O chips in the connectors cost maximum 1,50 USD each end. That would make 3 USD / cable so the 2 meter Cable costs for Apple arouund 4-5 dollars.

10 times profit for 2 metres of copper or fibre channel cable.

I it is really a shame that the richest IT company in the world has to RIP OFF their so beloved customers. "Here in Apple, we care"

Yeh they care, ABOUT YOUR MONEY

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Well mr smart guy tell us? How much those DSP I/O chips costs? A dollar? Two? Ten dollars each?

Do you know how much it costs to manufacture an ARM A5 chip? I do. Do you?
Do you realize, that A5 chip is 1000x more complex than that Intel LightPeak DSP Chip?

You do realize that an optical transceiver is needed to get from the electrical to optical domain and back? The fiber alone doesn't do much. The bulk of the cost will be in the ROSA (photodetector) and TOSA (laser). The Thunderbolt link will run at twice the speed, but for a comparison, look at the 10GBase-SR SFP+ transceivers.

 

[ncaissie]

Existing copper cables won’t be made more expensive. This is a different kind of cable.

Only the gradually-increasing adoption of Thunderbolt will bring prices down—and if anything, fiber optic support helps that general trend. Canceling already-promised Thunderbolt enhancements won’t actually help the Thunderbolt market.

He didn’t' say they were going to make them more expensive. He said "How about making the current cables - and accessories - more affordable first"
Which means they are to expensive right now.

 

[terraphantm]

You do realize that an optical transceiver is needed to get from the electrical to optical domain and back? The fiber alone doesn't do much. The bulk of the cost will be in the ROSA (photodetector) and TOSA (laser). The Thunderbolt link will run at twice the speed, but for a comparison, look at the 10GBase-SR SFP+ transceivers.

Ideally that should be built into the computer and the various peripherals

 

[xinu]

Ideally that should be built into the computer and the various peripherals

Correctomundo. It's silly that they put the chips onto the plugs. Does not compute, but maybe it just business as usual. People paying 50 dollars for 2m copper wire are very profitable customers

Just like 199 dollar HDMI cables "your youtube never looked crisper" lol

 

[darkplanets]

Tbolt will be a niche connection standard for some time, if not forever. Ala firewire. Like FW it will be superior to USB until its death. The only way this changes is if Intel gets the pre-built PC market to adopt these, which is unlikely.

I don't understand why everyone is bitching about this... if you dont want the optics cable (and the faster speed) then don't use it. You can still use the copper to both transfer data quickly and to power your local devices. If you want higher speeds over longer distances, your external device will likely be self powered anyways (monitor, raid stacks, etc). Who is going to run a small portable HDD stack 30m away that only takes in-line power (thus limiting what you can use in that stack as well)? That's just dumb.

 

[doctor-don]

LOL, what a failure thunderbolt is becoming. All this hype and time.... where are devices for consumers?

Have any of you;

- seen anyone having a thunderbolt device?
- seen a thunderbolt device on a store shelf?

Do we have numbers on the adoption rate of thunderbolt? Have other venders signed on to support it?

Sure it would be nice to have affordable thunderbolt accessories right now, but when I upgraded from a 2010 --> 2011 macbook pro, the only thing it did was add additional functionality to the existing display port. It didn't hurt me any, and I'm glad I have that option if I need it.

If apple waited and released the 2011 mbp without thunderbolt built in, everyone would have complained in 2012/2013 about how apple could have included thunderbolt in their computer but chose not to. Apple is late to adopt USB 3, people complain. Apple is early in adopting thunderbolt, people complain.

The MacBook Pro I bought recently has a TB input connector. What can be connected to it?

 

[ericinboston]

TB is on the slow train to the cemetery...it's been out for years, it's been embraced by nobody, is EXTREMELY expensive for any kind of mainstream consumer adoption, less than 20 TB devices are available, Apple products like iPod/iPad/iPhone don't embrace it when USB 2.0 is often painfully slow, and now the longer cables are "coming end of year" with no pricing information.

TB has its stellar performance...but it's dying a horrible death.

 

[k4jbd]

Ideally that should be built into the computer and the various peripherals

No, not ideally.

There are numerous choices for optical components - each with different reach, bandwidth and cost. By using bolt-in optics, you're setting that reach and bandwidth with no possibility of upgrade. This is one of the reasons the MSA standard was created - easy upgradablity of optics (including provisions for using copper). Buying MSA optics is pretty easy, but there is confusion sometimes regarding compatibility. Then, there's the fiber and connectors - neither of which I think the public is really ready to deal with directly.

What the optical Thunderbolt cable does is integrate the functionality of the MSA transceiver with the optical cable so you ensure compatibility. The public doesn't have to deal with the fiber and potentially put in a piece that isn't the right type or is too long (or potentially too short).

 

[nelmat]

Laughable

The same voices any time there is an advance in technilogy. You can't get rid of the floppy drive, no one has cd burners and they cost a fortune! USB?! Where are the devices, where is the support, it has no market. Dvd? Too expensive. Blu ray? No market for it. The iPad? Sounds like a sanitary towel, laughable, will never sell.

Lmao.

Always the same.

New technology is introduced, it finds a niche, costs come down. Some technology, like thunderbolt and firewire isn't for average joe consumer, but has a market among professionals initially. Thunderbolt storage has revolutionised our offices, many other companies have thunderbolt set ups. Just beause you can't buy a TB hard drive in best buy for ten dollars doesn't make it a failure, any less than firewire was a failure.

This is the nature of technical advancement, and you would think that readers of a site such as this would understand that.

 

[Azathoth]

Sonnet announced one a year ago but they keep pushing its release. They may have cancelled it altogether since they removed it from their website. I bought a MBA thinking this adapter would be released (I need FireWire) and got screwed hard. At least if the new MBP doesn't have one, some other brand will feel the need to release such an adapter.

Same here - I bought the new MBA expecting a FW and a Gigabit adapter to be right round the corner, and I was prepared to pay around 50-100 USD for each. A year after the anticipated launch, neither Sonnet nor *anyone* else has a simple adapter.

The Expresscard adapter has a number of issues with drivers, not to mention that the adapter + expresscard starts to become bulky.

And no, carrying around a 27" display as the "adapter" is not a solution.

I would deem TB a mild "failure", definately does not live up to the promise of a single port as a bus interface extension - because you cannot buy half the anticipated peripherals for love nor money.

I've heard one of the issues has been getting hold of reference information and datasheets from Intel. Methinks there is a lot of things going on behind the scenes apart from mere incompetance. Why has Sonnet continually pushed back the dates for its peripherals? Even Belkin, who was quickly on the 802.11n and USB3 bandwagons has a Q2/Q3 2012(!) release for their TB dock. An interface adapter is not hard to develop, so this means that either price, licensing or external interests is holding back development.








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You do realize that an optical transceiver is needed to get from the electrical to optical domain and back? The fiber alone doesn't do much. The bulk of the cost will be in the ROSA (photodetector) and TOSA (laser). The Thunderbolt link will run at twice the speed, but for a comparison, look at the 10GBase-SR SFP+ transceivers.

Even 1Gbps SFP transceivers are 100-150 USD in bulk...

 

[JazzyGB1]

Daisy Chaining

The first problem with TB is that not many need it.
The second problem with TB is Daisy Chaining - no one wants to do it!
It just feels unnatural to connect a display, to a HD, to a video camera etc etc.
I think this is its biggest hurdle, it's a physiological objection to the way its implemented (for me it is anyway).
Being able to daisy chain, is totally different to HAVING to daisy chain.
If there was 2 or 3 TB ports on a Mac, then it would have more of a chance of gaining popularity, but I honestly believe even those who want the bandwidth, don't want to daisy chain to get it.
The other factor is that most peripherals don't need its bandwidth.
A printer, pen drive, graphics tablet, iPhone for example wont benefit at all, so it's really only HD's or other data intensive tasks and (in the grand sceme) there's not many people who need it.
TB needs to be significantly reduced in price to be of use to the masses and needs to be implemented differently to be accepted by the pro's.
This would create demand for it and drive manufacturers to build more.
At the moment its close to following ADC to the connection grave yard.

 

[winston1236]

i don't need a new cable for the thunderbolt device that i dont have yet because it doesn't exist yet either

 

[11thIndian]

Do you have some links about these other "high end" failures?

(and please exclude T-Bolt from the discussion, since it is such a failure - and your question implies that there are other high end technologies that Apple has introduced)

...train wreck...

I'm not going to exclude Thunderbolt from the discussion because Thunderbolt IS the discussion.

Limited availability and high prices are the hallmark of any emerging I/O. Firewire Drives were similarly expensive at the start 10 years ago. But for those who truly NEED them, that expense is WELL justified.

If you don't need 10Gbps [and most consumers won't], then don't use it.

But Thunderbolt isn't a failure, it's a technology that scales well beyond USB3. Just because every user doesn't need it's potential doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to those that do, as evidenced by numerous comments in this thread.

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The first problem with TB is that not many need it.
The second problem with TB is Daisy Chaining - no one wants to do it!
It just feels unnatural to connect a display, to a HD, to a video camera etc etc.
I think this is its biggest hurdle, it's a physiological objection to the way its implemented (for me it is anyway).
Being able to daisy chain, is totally different to HAVING to daisy chain.
If there was 2 or 3 TB ports on a Mac, then it would have more of a chance of gaining popularity, but I honestly believe even those who want the bandwidth, don't want to daisy chain to get it.
The other factor is that most peripherals don't need its bandwidth.
A printer, pen drive, graphics tablet, iPhone for example wont benefit at all, so it's really only HD's or other data intensive tasks and (in the grand sceme) there's not many people who need it.
TB needs to be significantly reduced in price to be of use to the masses and needs to be implemented differently to be accepted by the pro's.
This would create demand for it and drive manufacturers to build more.
At the moment its close to following ADC to the connection grave yard.

iMacs have 2 TB ports. So no need to daisy chain there.

The ability to daisy chain to make the maximum use of a port is not a downside. But if you're expecting Apple to start putting two or 3 of these ports on every machine forget it. Part of the advantage is needing less ports on mobile devices.

 

[AidenShaw]

I'm not going to exclude Thunderbolt from the discussion because Thunderbolt IS the discussion.

But, since T-Bolt is the topic, it would be redundant to include it.

You said:

Originally Posted by 11thIndian
People complain about how consumer oriented the company is becoming until they release a technology that's aimed at high end users- then it's a failure because it doesn't sell like iPhones.

This implies that there are other "high end" technologies besides T-Bolt that Apple instroduced that have been deemed "failures".

I wouldn't consider 1394 to be a "failure" at all - my Dell multi-touch tablet and Dell desktop have 1394 ports standard, as does my DIY Windows Home Server's Asus mobo.

Apple did completely botch the 1394b transition, but rather than failing 1394 has simply been replaced by something better accepted by the market - USB 2.0.

Once upon a time SCSI was the king of local disk protocols. Today SAS and SATA are king. This doesn't mean that SCSI was a failure, just that the technology moved past it.

I see that T-Bolt could have a great future as a laptop docking station protocol - but not as an end-user device protocol. (For high end RAID arrays, yes - but few "end-users" need multi-terabyte RAID arrays.)

It's unfortunate that the Apple T-Bolt Display is so underwhelming. If it had included a couple of 2.5" SSD internal drive bays, USB 3.0, and two or four PM-capable eSATA ports if would be a great docking station. (and the icing on the cake would have been an option for an external graphics card....)

 

[11thIndian]

But, since T-Bolt is the topic, it would be redundant to include it.

You said:



This implies that there are other "high end" technologies besides T-Bolt that Apple instroduced that have been deemed "failures".

You might have read it that way, but I was talking exclusively about TB.

I look at it this way. If you don't need Thunderbolt. It doesn't take up any extra space on your machine as it's the DisplayPort as well. But it's invisible for the average user.

But for those who need that fast I/O, it's a godsend. At less than half the speed, I could care less about USB3. It's inclusion may come to the Mac, once money and logistics make it practical forApple to just swap out USB2 ports for USB3. But I'm not crying for it.

Do you really see the space in the CinemaDisplay for all the ports and bays you describe? There's a point where they're having to significantly alter the product to the benefit of a very few people.