External Thunderbolt PCI Expansion Chassis and Hub in Development

Thats a cool idea. Wouldn't surprise me if Apple themselves have played around with the idea too.

 

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Exciting possibilities. My thunderbolt iMac could use this.

 

This is quite old news. Sonnet announced a PCIe expansion dock months back - with their Echo Express boxes.

linky

 

would love to see this on thunderbolt displays. it would actually influence me to buy one.

 

Would the Macbook Air be compatible with its stripped down Thunderbolt port?

This is a very clever solution for people who want to add some extra horsepower to the Air, Mini or the 13" MBP.

Just think about the possibilities if it's going to be modular. You could just insert a high-end graphics-card and you're good to go.

 

This would be great - I've been clammering for something like this for ages. (Ever since Apple started putting underpowered none-upgradeable graphics cards in their machines.)

I can only see one major downside though...

- Who the heck is going to write the software drivers for these Graphics cards? Apple sure isn't - and it's not like there are a whole bunch of Mac compatible graphics cards out there to choose from...

 

So in theory if someone created USB3 drivers for Mac OS X one could put a PCIe USB card into one of those external boxes and thus have what so many people seem to be demanding?

 

...if the drivers for Lion exist, which they probably won't. Also depending on the power supply the true high-end graphics cards might not get enough juice.

 

Yeah .. imagine that Thunderbolt naysayers ... Can USB 3.0 do that?

 

I'd imagine anything like this would have to come with its own power supply to be viable in the first place, so I wouldn't worry.

P.S. So now you people understand why some of us see a bright future for thunderbolt. Buy yourself a low-end mac mini, then get yourself one of these babies, and presto! A gaming PC. All we need now is for AMD/NVidia to start provide their own drivers, then we'd be all set. I wonder if NDIS could be ported to Mac OS?

 

If the purpse is gaming, you could just use in boot camp. The selection is still much larger for Windows.

 

The Sonnets come with 150W or 75W power supplies. The Radeon HD 6970 requires about 360W. So, as I said- the high end graphics cards will still be out of reach unless they decide to stick a rather large PSU on the back of those things.

Of course, not everyone will need the best of the best. I imagine for most people the bay PSU will suffice for whatever they want to put in it.

 

I agree about the Apple/Mac OS X not supporting it. However I doubt the thunderbolt cable would supply power to the box I would guess it would have external power.

 

Think of the new Apple Thunderbolt Display if Apple put a monster GPU in the display and when you dock your MacBook Air it turbo charges it with a beautiful display and ports already there! This sounds like a logical progression for mobile computing coexisting with power users!

 

If you like the idea please express that here : http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=89321949134&topic=17768

Can add suggestions as to what you want aswell.

 

Wow, I've been longing for this.
TBH I don't think that this will work very well outside bootcamp. So it's probably suited for windows more.

 

You won't need to rely on Mac drivers. Just boot camp into Windows 7 for your gaming. Unless you're thinking about productivity software... Still, if Sonnet is making something like this, you know they'll be including Mac drivers of some description for the hardware. They'll probably include a list of supported graphics cards or something. We'll see... The real question will be if the Mac versions of this external design will require Mac versions of the graphics cards. Again, if you just use it for a boot camp installation, that shouldn't matter too much either. Anyway...I'm just speculating, which is about as good as most people are doing, I suppose. =P

In any case, I will definitely buy something like this if it provides a real solution. I just dumped my PC tower because it's noisy and large and a pain in the rear as it freezes up on occasion. Yes, Windows 7 is better, but I still get a BSD every now and then, and on multiple machines (so, I'm not convinced it's just a hardware issue). Maybe I just suck.

 

Shame thunderbolt isn't fast enough to support full-speed PCIe cards, otherwise it'd be a lot more interesting.

 

Ha. I suck. Didn't realise Thunderbolt isn't working under Windows yet. Thought there were some random Sony machines or something that were implementing it. Thanks for informing me!

 

Yes I wondered that too - hence my comments about writing software drivers. - It would be far better if the hardware supports Mac and PC graphics cards (if this is possible). There are a far greater (and cheaper) range of PC cards available - but they would require the necessary drivers for them to be supported on the Mac.

If the hardware only would work with Mac compatible graphics cards, what's the guarantee that these work under Windows 7 even IF thunderbolt was supported.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.