Except it's quite clear that this thread is about the consumer market, where the standard is pretty much a dead end. If you want to argue a tangent then we can talk about all kinds of interfaces and ask why Apple won't include those.
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Apple Still Considering USB 3.0 in Addition to Thunderbolt?
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Except it's quite clear that this thread is about the consumer market, where the standard is pretty much a dead end. If you want to argue a tangent then we can talk about all kinds of interfaces and ask why Apple won't include those.
No it won't. If TB doesn't get volume then $50 cables are only the start. Apple would hang on for a couple of years and then it would go into the "storage vault" alongside the Apple Display Connector ( which was the last time Apple tried to bundle connectors on a non-standard).
Frankly, if TB doesn't get spun into a real, open standard with multiple implementers at some point it won't fly long term. Nobody with any sense wants to get locked into proprietary hardware. Even a Mac can be booted into Windows if someone wanted to go Windows only (for reasons that make sense for their situation.)
No amount of smoke blowing at Apple stores is going to pull the wool over most folks eyes if no one else picks this up.
Apple needs volume of TB components to go very high. That way the component costs go lower and Apple gets to keep its margins high. If the TBmarket is limited to 12-15M Macs a year.... that's bad.
First it won't be adopted on iOS devices (since most of them need to hook to local machines ).
Second peripheral vendors will see the closed, highly segmented market as opportunity to raise prices higher. The will be a TB tax on all the devices. Again this keeps volume down and prices up.
Intel will get bored with it too if just restricted to Macs.
Nice to strip it out of context - note that the first reply mentioned daisy chain limits.
This is silly - I'm done arguing about whether to count the TBolt devices or all of the downstream devices connected to various PCIe controllers.
</tangent>
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If the system (CPU/memory/IO) load is too high, it could fail to meet the aggregate bandwidth spec.
Does that mean that it's not a TBolt port if the system gets too busy?
Yes it would be a hack, but it could also be a TBolt port that functions perfectly except for the speed. But we'll never know, because it would be pointless to make it.
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Without AMD on board, it will always seem proprietary.
This! I am remembering it being 2 years before it began to be common place on desktops (and you only got two ports) and nearly 10 years before the keyboard manufacturers stopped putting a usb>ps2 port in each keyboard. We still have ps2 port in new machines. (and serial ports...? I haven't used one of those for 5+ years in business; who uses it at home?)
For a long time many thought Firewire would supersede USB. But I could never purchase Firewire mboards, because they were never offered... sad. And now PC sellers are starting (for the past 2 years) putting them in --- after Apple decided to drop them. yay.
Addendum:
Tbolt is Intel's baby; hopefully they can push it out to everyone else real soon.
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I don't see Apple ever offering blu-ray. They are trying to remove the cd drive itself, not support additional media.
Yeah, you can still buy a FW hd. They aren't everywhere, but they are in a lot of places.
A quick question, who has daisy chained more than 3 devices with USB? I've done 4 for fun, but have only ever been able to daisy chain 2 devices via USB in a working environment; computer > monitor > keyboard & mouse or UFD. (Yeah, I know the Apple keyboard does it but did many people attach another series of hubs?)
Yeah, it was widespread, in new machines. As an 11 year old I didn't really want to shell out $150 for a new 56.6k modem.. and my parents certainly didn't care. I bought a 56k in 1999. Made no difference, still dog slow.
You're talking about a difference of 24.5 kbps. That's barely 3 KB/s. Given that today I'm using a connection that gets upwards of 1.2 MB/s, I don't think that really matters very much.
I'm sorry... are we on a PC site? No? All right then. And since when is Intel the only game in town? Dec Alpha had chips running at 500 MHz, thanks.
Riveting, but completely irrelevant. This is a Mac Rumors site. It's not my fault if you only jumped on the Mac bandwagon when they came into vogue.
No, you're wrong. At its inception, the G3 topped out at 300 MHz. The 333 MHz minitower came out in 98.
I'm well aware. I should be, given my signature... I'm typing this on a Beige G3. I'd overclock the bus to 83.3 MHz, but unfortunately the G3's base frequency and OF registers aren't configured appropriately for that speed, and so it actually runs slower on an 83 MHz bus, especially as it defaults to CL3 at that speed.
You're wrong again. The 350 MHz B&W G3 (along with the 400 MHz G3) came out in 1999. However, there was a 350 MHz variant of the Power Macintosh 9600 (9600/350), based on the 604eV "Mach V" processor. Wish to hell I owned one but sadly, I'm stuck with a 9600/200. That was 1997, by the way.
That's nice. Obviously it wasn't, and I was actually running my Beige G3/300 at 366 MHz when it came out (overclocked, of course, but still.)
I was hoping you'd make a point, but it appears all you've done is taken the time to quibble over little details (whilst getting them wrong) without relating them to any larger agenda.
No devices yet are too well optimized for thunderbolt. Consider this graph:
No thunderbolt device is capable of even half that yet, which I think speaks more to the devices than it does to thunderbolt. If there's a device I need, and it exists for thunderbolt, then I'm buying that instead of a USB 3 device, assuming there is no major price difference. It's that simple. I believe that's how the transition will happen. I just hope PC manufacturers get on the bandwagon.
With that said, USB3 is needed. There are not that many devices for thunderbolt yet, and till that happens, we need a backwards compatible solution that doesn't require an adapter. I plan to dump USB entirely once I am able to. I'll be able to get a few CPU clock cycles back that way.
No thunderbolt device is capable of even half that yet, which I think speaks more to the devices than it does to thunderbolt. If there's a device I need, and it exists for thunderbolt, then I'm buying that instead of a USB 3 device, assuming there is no major price difference. It's that simple. I believe that's how the transition will happen. I just hope PC manufacturers get on the bandwagon.
With that said, USB3 is needed. There are not that many devices for thunderbolt yet, and till that happens, we need a backwards compatible solution that doesn't require an adapter. I plan to dump USB entirely once I am able to. I'll be able to get a few CPU clock cycles back that way.
LGA 2011 default, supports US 3.0. In the next Mac Pro would be folly to deprive him of this function :]
@DESNOS and other TB fans
Another issue that must Some people understand what it is that, there is almost nothing on the market would support TB!
Who needs something that is NOT USED?
@DESNOS and other TB fans
Another issue that must Some people understand what it is that, there is almost nothing on the market would support TB!
Who needs something that is NOT USED?
No context or content was stripped from the following specific post to which I was referring to throughout our dialogue.
View attachment 301354
This thread is full of self-proclaimed experts that do not know what they are talking about. Anyone still arguing about the technological superiority of USB 3 over Thunderbolt is ignoring the fact that you can run USB 3 peripherals using a thunderbolt-to-USB 3 adaptor, like the one I posted about earlier. Yes, 127 devices can be on the same USB bus and one thunderbolt connection can host those 127 USB devices. Also, you could not do the reverse, that is, get a USB 3 to thunderbolt adaptor because USB 3 is not as fast.
Seriously, just because you can argue passionately about something and write more than other people does not make your theories true and your opinions any more right. Thunderbolt is like the new PCIe without PCIe slots. People are still not getting this and maybe marketing need to address it. Until then, please, read about all the technologies you are discussing before expressing an opinion about them. Repeating lies and misunderstandings does not make them truth.
Seriously, just because you can argue passionately about something and write more than other people does not make your theories true and your opinions any more right. Thunderbolt is like the new PCIe without PCIe slots. People are still not getting this and maybe marketing need to address it. Until then, please, read about all the technologies you are discussing before expressing an opinion about them. Repeating lies and misunderstandings does not make them truth.
Because we really love connectors
USB, FW400, FW800, DVI, HDMI, RJ45, iPod - haven't we had enough cables to move data from point A to point B? If there is a new one, it better support displays, hard drives AND cell phones, even if by having separate sets of wires internally. I thought that was the point of Thunderbird, but it doesn't look like USB 3.0 is anywhere close to driving a 30 inch display.
USB, FW400, FW800, DVI, HDMI, RJ45, iPod - haven't we had enough cables to move data from point A to point B? If there is a new one, it better support displays, hard drives AND cell phones, even if by having separate sets of wires internally. I thought that was the point of Thunderbird, but it doesn't look like USB 3.0 is anywhere close to driving a 30 inch display.
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I have a feeling I'll be buying a thunderbolt to USB 3.0 adapter...
I have a feeling I'll be buying a thunderbolt to USB 3.0 adapter...
What good is BD in a laptop?
If the laptop only has BD-ROM, then all that it can be used for is watching BD movies. The benefits of BD over DVD or HD digital media on laptop sized screens is negligible. It does allow the user to hook up the laptop to a TV and use the laptop as a glorified BD player. But, why put that extra wear and tear on a comparatively expensive laptop when standalone BD players are relatively cheap?
If the laptop has BD-RE (are any laptops on the market with this?), then it does increase usefulness by facilitating external data storage. But, burnable BD optical media is expensive. A single 50GB rewritable BD-RE cost around 30 dollars. Given the costs, it makes much more sense to use external harddrives for this type of storage.
Oh really?
I said:
You said:
Those missing three sentences had quite a bit of context, IMO.
The post to which I was responding is the first post that you made in this thread that referred to the number of devices that can be connected via TBolt.
This thread contains more facepalms than I've seen in one place for a long time.
Apple is going to include USB 3.0 when Intel includes it in the chipsets that Apple will use next year. They are going to include USB ports and it would literally be more effort to have them as USB 2.0 ports than USB 3.0.
There is little or no point including any sooner. Yes, there are lots of USB 3 devices on the market but this forum aside, most people haven't bothered yet. Also, it doesn't bring much advantage over USB 2.0 anyway given the real world top speeds of platter based disks. How many of you have external SSDs in USB 3 boxes?
Most of the people who have bought USB 3 devices already, don't care that its faster than USB 2.0, many probably don't even know they have it. People who care about speed are using FW800 or eSATA.
Thunderbolt is not an equivalent to USB 3.0. There is no point having a Thunderbolt mouse or keyboard, this would be stupid.
While you can get USB video cards, they aren't a patch on the full size ones which you'll be able to add via TB.
People aren't really thinking about the sorts of things they can do with TB before writing it off like mindless idiots. TB means you can have a laptop docking station that you might actually use unlike the old ones which were specific to a given model of laptop. TB docks will be useful for any Mac.
TB means you can add fibre channel to iMacs, Mac Minis and portable Macs. This means you can add any Mac you want to a fibre channel SAN. Thats pretty damn cool.
Apple is going to include USB 3.0 when Intel includes it in the chipsets that Apple will use next year. They are going to include USB ports and it would literally be more effort to have them as USB 2.0 ports than USB 3.0.
There is little or no point including any sooner. Yes, there are lots of USB 3 devices on the market but this forum aside, most people haven't bothered yet. Also, it doesn't bring much advantage over USB 2.0 anyway given the real world top speeds of platter based disks. How many of you have external SSDs in USB 3 boxes?
Most of the people who have bought USB 3 devices already, don't care that its faster than USB 2.0, many probably don't even know they have it. People who care about speed are using FW800 or eSATA.
Thunderbolt is not an equivalent to USB 3.0. There is no point having a Thunderbolt mouse or keyboard, this would be stupid.
While you can get USB video cards, they aren't a patch on the full size ones which you'll be able to add via TB.
People aren't really thinking about the sorts of things they can do with TB before writing it off like mindless idiots. TB means you can have a laptop docking station that you might actually use unlike the old ones which were specific to a given model of laptop. TB docks will be useful for any Mac.
TB means you can add fibre channel to iMacs, Mac Minis and portable Macs. This means you can add any Mac you want to a fibre channel SAN. Thats pretty damn cool.
Rant, part 1:
Precisely what I was thinking.
However, the gist of the original article seemed to be that Apple was considering inclusion of USB 3.0 prior to the introduction of Ivy Bridge, and there are several possible reasons why this could be true. Renesas (NEC) is finally shipping its third gen USB 3.0 controllers which offer considerable improvements over prior offerings, EFI/Mac OS X driver support is probably fairly well along at this point, the cost and power requirements of adding a USB 3.0 controller to a Mac Pro wouldn’t have a significant impact, and it would make for a reasonable checklist feature. This would also give Apple the chance to test their USB 3.0 protocol stack on a smaller scale before mass deployment with Ivy Bridge systems.
Only a small percentage of the billions of USB devices shipped to date have been rotational media based mass storage devices. USB, FireWire and Thunderbolt are all about much more than external storage. The Universal Serial Bus was developed for general purpose I/O, and its current large scale deployment and low cost allow it to work brilliantly for a large number of applications. Apple alone has shipped about half a billion USB enabled devices, so you can probably rest at night knowing that they won’t drop USB support from Macs anytime in the near future.
The shared bus and tiered-star topology of USB have inherent limitations, however, which for some usage models necessitate another type of I/O solution. In the past, Apple has pushed FireWire (1394a/b) as that solution. It’s peer-to-peer architecture, higher available bandwidth/lower protocol overhead, and higher bus power allow it to be used where USB can’t. Many pro audio interfaces and other A/V equipment that require isochronous transfers sport FireWire interfaces. Apple also leverages the unique abilities of FireWire with their Target Disk Mode, a handy feature that is just not possible over USB.
USB 3.0 improves in many ways over USB 2.0 with the switch from a half-duplex link to dual-simplex, better support for isochronous traffic, increased bus power limits, and an increase in theoretical bandwidth to 400 Mb/s. It still suffers from the same host arbitrated shared bus and tiered-star topology problems as its predecessor though, and the new SuperSpeed mode wasn’t achievable over the existing physical layer, so new cables and ports are required along with essentially a doubling of the number of pins and conductors, and in some cases considerably larger connectors. Motherboards with USB 3.0 host controllers have been shipping for 20 months now, yet the other half of the equation is having devices that support SuperSpeed mode to connect to them. Thus far, the only silicon for devices that seems to have made it to market are USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chips, and thus the only SuperSpeed enabled devices are a handful of USB flash drives and a slew of external mass storage solutions. (I have seen one USB 3.0 flash card reader as well.) Also, judging by the current size of USB 3.0 flash drives, the first gen USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chips are rather large, and the shrinking necessary for the inclusion of USB 3.0 in mobile devices just hasn’t happened yet. So for all the ballyhoo over Thunderbolt being a proprietary fail, just remember that far more devices will ship in 2011 with the Apple 30-pin dock connector than the USB 3.0 “standard.” As Steve said a year ago “We don't see USB 3 taking off at this time,” and it would appear that he was correct.
You’ll note that Apple removed neither USB nor FireWire from the current Mac lineup when they added Thunderbolt. That’s because Thunderbolt is designed to address an entirely different I/O problem, namely providing a very high bandwidth, low-latency connection for the expansion and docking of Apple’s generally very compact and non-user upgradeable systems. ExpressCard slots take up an enormous amount of volume in a notebook computer, don’t provide adequate power for many applications and don’t even have the usable bandwidth of USB 3.0. ExpressCard 2.0 is supposed to triple that bandwidth, but so far it’s only a spec, and even if it were shipping, it still wouldn’t have the headroom to fully back even a single SATA 6 Gbit/s adapter. But what if we could expose a PCIe 2.0 x4 link, and then combine it on the same port as a packetized digital display interface so that single cable docking solutions would be possible? And thus we arrive at Thunderbolt. I imagine as time goes on, Apple will ditch ExpressCard even on the 17-inch MacBook Pros. The outlook for FireWire going forward has been a bit questionable for some time now, and Thunderbolt may someday prove to be a suitable replacement for it as well. USB is just a different creature altogether though, and Thunderbolt is in no way intended to displace it.
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I’m sure this post will be totally disregarded, or discredited because of my “expert” tone, but all I’m lobbying for here is the application of some simple common sense.
To wit:
Products tend to remain on the market as long as they can be produced and sold by their manufacturer for a reasonable profit without detracting from other areas of their core business.
A low-volume, high-margin product can often be as commercially successful as a low-margin, high-volume product.
Most new technologies when introduced are expensive and only have limited availability, but over time, as production levels increase and the technology matures, they become far less expensive and far more ubiquitous.
Adoption rates and unit sales do not necessarily correlate to the quality or suitability of a product.
Just because you personally do not purchase, endorse, want or need a particular product, does not mean that product will soon cease to exist.
A larger number on a spec sheet does not make a product inherently better than the competition.
Examples:
You can actually still buy a CD-ROM drive... Remember those?
The Pagani Zonda is not a total fail even though it’s limited in production, absurdly expensive, and pointlessly fast for most uses.
DVD players cost a grand when they first came out, now you can pick one up for $30.
McDonald’s is not the best restaurant in the world, despite the fact that they serve more meals than any other franchise. Walmart does not provide the best shopping experience even though Americans insist on buying more than 20% of all consumer goods there. And Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night” is not the best musical composition currently available for purchase despite its position atop the Billboard charts.
Although I have no personal use for country music or an SUV, it would be foolish of me to expect these genres to die the death any time soon. Despite the desires of all the haters out there to see otherwise, rap music turned 30 this year.
USB is not clearly better than FireWire and Thunderbolt because it can address 127 devices instead of 62 or 7. Is a car with 127 wheels clearly better than a car with 4?
Can you even imagine what a computer with 127 USB devices attached to it would look like? I’m kind of surprised I couldn’t find any images of somebody trying this as a Guinness world record attempt. Although the USB 3.0 device address field width allows for hubs with as many as 15 downstream ports, the maximum number of ports available on a hub you can currently buy is just 4. Since each hub counts as a device, you’d need 32 hubs to max out the address space and would only have 95 downstream ports left, after spending $1000 on hubs and cables. (Heck, even with the only Thunderbolt cable in town being from Apple and costing $49, you can still connect the maximum number of devices to a single TB port for only $300.) And then there’s the problem of the fact that the host controller and OS are responsible for link maintenance and arbitration of all traffic on the bus. This means that CPU usage will climb as you continue to add devices to the tree until it mercifully plateaus right about at the point where there is no usable bandwidth left on the bus, because protocol and link layer overhead have consumed it all. If current USB 3.0 host controllers require 35-40% of theoretical bandwidth for protocol overhead with just a single device connected, how many devices can you plug in before you actually reach that point? Maybe a dozen, seriously...
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I’d also like to take a moment to dispel the myth that Thunderbolt would somehow be faster if they had only used optical cables as they originally tested with. The limit to the existing Thunderbolt controllers on the market is that they only support connections for up to 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes and 2 DisplayPort 1.1a ports. No matter how many downstream devices you attach, everything gets funneled through those connections. Now bear in mind that 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0 alone offer the same 20 Gbps of bandwidth as the DMI which connects the CPU to the PCH. So if you pull those 4 PCI lanes off the PCH, as Apple has done in some implementations, the bottleneck (if any) is actually the DMI. Also note that pretty much every USB 3.0 host controller on the market, just like every motherboard feature not included in the CPU or chipset, is hooked up via PCIe lanes coming off of the PCH and is subject to the same limitations. Now mind you, PCIe and DMI are very fast point to point protocols and the switches and multiplexers which support them are incredibly efficient. This is akin to having several devices connected to a 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, even if you only have a single 1 Gbps uplink, most devices are rarely bottlenecked, because between any two points, whoever has the conch shell gets pretty much full bandwidth. The only way to get around the DMI “bottleneck” is to borrow some of the PCIe lanes that come directly off of the CPU and are intended for discrete GPUs, which Apple has also done in some cases. So until Intel releases a Thunderbolt controller that can connect to more than four PCIe 2.0 lanes or can hook to DisplayPort 1.2 links, it’s already running at full speed. You could roll your own optical cable right now for fun, perhaps even for less than $49, and no doubt get considerably longer usable cable lengths, but it won’t make your TB port one bit faster. Future Thunderbolt controllers for systems with DMI 3.0, PCIe 3.0, and DisplayPort 1.2 might require optical cables, but the current generation does not.
Precisely what I was thinking.
However, the gist of the original article seemed to be that Apple was considering inclusion of USB 3.0 prior to the introduction of Ivy Bridge, and there are several possible reasons why this could be true. Renesas (NEC) is finally shipping its third gen USB 3.0 controllers which offer considerable improvements over prior offerings, EFI/Mac OS X driver support is probably fairly well along at this point, the cost and power requirements of adding a USB 3.0 controller to a Mac Pro wouldn’t have a significant impact, and it would make for a reasonable checklist feature. This would also give Apple the chance to test their USB 3.0 protocol stack on a smaller scale before mass deployment with Ivy Bridge systems.
Only a small percentage of the billions of USB devices shipped to date have been rotational media based mass storage devices. USB, FireWire and Thunderbolt are all about much more than external storage. The Universal Serial Bus was developed for general purpose I/O, and its current large scale deployment and low cost allow it to work brilliantly for a large number of applications. Apple alone has shipped about half a billion USB enabled devices, so you can probably rest at night knowing that they won’t drop USB support from Macs anytime in the near future.
The shared bus and tiered-star topology of USB have inherent limitations, however, which for some usage models necessitate another type of I/O solution. In the past, Apple has pushed FireWire (1394a/b) as that solution. It’s peer-to-peer architecture, higher available bandwidth/lower protocol overhead, and higher bus power allow it to be used where USB can’t. Many pro audio interfaces and other A/V equipment that require isochronous transfers sport FireWire interfaces. Apple also leverages the unique abilities of FireWire with their Target Disk Mode, a handy feature that is just not possible over USB.
USB 3.0 improves in many ways over USB 2.0 with the switch from a half-duplex link to dual-simplex, better support for isochronous traffic, increased bus power limits, and an increase in theoretical bandwidth to 400 Mb/s. It still suffers from the same host arbitrated shared bus and tiered-star topology problems as its predecessor though, and the new SuperSpeed mode wasn’t achievable over the existing physical layer, so new cables and ports are required along with essentially a doubling of the number of pins and conductors, and in some cases considerably larger connectors. Motherboards with USB 3.0 host controllers have been shipping for 20 months now, yet the other half of the equation is having devices that support SuperSpeed mode to connect to them. Thus far, the only silicon for devices that seems to have made it to market are USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chips, and thus the only SuperSpeed enabled devices are a handful of USB flash drives and a slew of external mass storage solutions. (I have seen one USB 3.0 flash card reader as well.) Also, judging by the current size of USB 3.0 flash drives, the first gen USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chips are rather large, and the shrinking necessary for the inclusion of USB 3.0 in mobile devices just hasn’t happened yet. So for all the ballyhoo over Thunderbolt being a proprietary fail, just remember that far more devices will ship in 2011 with the Apple 30-pin dock connector than the USB 3.0 “standard.” As Steve said a year ago “We don't see USB 3 taking off at this time,” and it would appear that he was correct.
You’ll note that Apple removed neither USB nor FireWire from the current Mac lineup when they added Thunderbolt. That’s because Thunderbolt is designed to address an entirely different I/O problem, namely providing a very high bandwidth, low-latency connection for the expansion and docking of Apple’s generally very compact and non-user upgradeable systems. ExpressCard slots take up an enormous amount of volume in a notebook computer, don’t provide adequate power for many applications and don’t even have the usable bandwidth of USB 3.0. ExpressCard 2.0 is supposed to triple that bandwidth, but so far it’s only a spec, and even if it were shipping, it still wouldn’t have the headroom to fully back even a single SATA 6 Gbit/s adapter. But what if we could expose a PCIe 2.0 x4 link, and then combine it on the same port as a packetized digital display interface so that single cable docking solutions would be possible? And thus we arrive at Thunderbolt. I imagine as time goes on, Apple will ditch ExpressCard even on the 17-inch MacBook Pros. The outlook for FireWire going forward has been a bit questionable for some time now, and Thunderbolt may someday prove to be a suitable replacement for it as well. USB is just a different creature altogether though, and Thunderbolt is in no way intended to displace it.
----------
I’m sure this post will be totally disregarded, or discredited because of my “expert” tone, but all I’m lobbying for here is the application of some simple common sense.
To wit:
Products tend to remain on the market as long as they can be produced and sold by their manufacturer for a reasonable profit without detracting from other areas of their core business.
A low-volume, high-margin product can often be as commercially successful as a low-margin, high-volume product.
Most new technologies when introduced are expensive and only have limited availability, but over time, as production levels increase and the technology matures, they become far less expensive and far more ubiquitous.
Adoption rates and unit sales do not necessarily correlate to the quality or suitability of a product.
Just because you personally do not purchase, endorse, want or need a particular product, does not mean that product will soon cease to exist.
A larger number on a spec sheet does not make a product inherently better than the competition.
Examples:
You can actually still buy a CD-ROM drive... Remember those?
The Pagani Zonda is not a total fail even though it’s limited in production, absurdly expensive, and pointlessly fast for most uses.
DVD players cost a grand when they first came out, now you can pick one up for $30.
McDonald’s is not the best restaurant in the world, despite the fact that they serve more meals than any other franchise. Walmart does not provide the best shopping experience even though Americans insist on buying more than 20% of all consumer goods there. And Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night” is not the best musical composition currently available for purchase despite its position atop the Billboard charts.
Although I have no personal use for country music or an SUV, it would be foolish of me to expect these genres to die the death any time soon. Despite the desires of all the haters out there to see otherwise, rap music turned 30 this year.
USB is not clearly better than FireWire and Thunderbolt because it can address 127 devices instead of 62 or 7. Is a car with 127 wheels clearly better than a car with 4?
Can you even imagine what a computer with 127 USB devices attached to it would look like? I’m kind of surprised I couldn’t find any images of somebody trying this as a Guinness world record attempt. Although the USB 3.0 device address field width allows for hubs with as many as 15 downstream ports, the maximum number of ports available on a hub you can currently buy is just 4. Since each hub counts as a device, you’d need 32 hubs to max out the address space and would only have 95 downstream ports left, after spending $1000 on hubs and cables. (Heck, even with the only Thunderbolt cable in town being from Apple and costing $49, you can still connect the maximum number of devices to a single TB port for only $300.) And then there’s the problem of the fact that the host controller and OS are responsible for link maintenance and arbitration of all traffic on the bus. This means that CPU usage will climb as you continue to add devices to the tree until it mercifully plateaus right about at the point where there is no usable bandwidth left on the bus, because protocol and link layer overhead have consumed it all. If current USB 3.0 host controllers require 35-40% of theoretical bandwidth for protocol overhead with just a single device connected, how many devices can you plug in before you actually reach that point? Maybe a dozen, seriously...
----------
I’d also like to take a moment to dispel the myth that Thunderbolt would somehow be faster if they had only used optical cables as they originally tested with. The limit to the existing Thunderbolt controllers on the market is that they only support connections for up to 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes and 2 DisplayPort 1.1a ports. No matter how many downstream devices you attach, everything gets funneled through those connections. Now bear in mind that 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0 alone offer the same 20 Gbps of bandwidth as the DMI which connects the CPU to the PCH. So if you pull those 4 PCI lanes off the PCH, as Apple has done in some implementations, the bottleneck (if any) is actually the DMI. Also note that pretty much every USB 3.0 host controller on the market, just like every motherboard feature not included in the CPU or chipset, is hooked up via PCIe lanes coming off of the PCH and is subject to the same limitations. Now mind you, PCIe and DMI are very fast point to point protocols and the switches and multiplexers which support them are incredibly efficient. This is akin to having several devices connected to a 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, even if you only have a single 1 Gbps uplink, most devices are rarely bottlenecked, because between any two points, whoever has the conch shell gets pretty much full bandwidth. The only way to get around the DMI “bottleneck” is to borrow some of the PCIe lanes that come directly off of the CPU and are intended for discrete GPUs, which Apple has also done in some cases. So until Intel releases a Thunderbolt controller that can connect to more than four PCIe 2.0 lanes or can hook to DisplayPort 1.2 links, it’s already running at full speed. You could roll your own optical cable right now for fun, perhaps even for less than $49, and no doubt get considerably longer usable cable lengths, but it won’t make your TB port one bit faster. Future Thunderbolt controllers for systems with DMI 3.0, PCIe 3.0, and DisplayPort 1.2 might require optical cables, but the current generation does not.
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