Hewlett Packard Not Convinced of the Value of Thunderbolt

[cirus]

I'm shocked at most people on here. I don't think people realize the importance of thunderbolt/light peak. Thunderbolt surpasses USB 3.0 by far. Thunderbolt technology has the capacity to theoretically reach speeds higher than 1 terabyte/sec in the future. There is no need for those kinds of speeds now, but as our standard increases each year, we will need something that fast. USB won't hold up to that. The sooner we adopt thunderbolt the less headache we will have later when people find out they need to switch from USB to thunderbolt because it simply can't keep up. HP is only delaying the inevitable.

This is a paradox. Pun intended

1. It does not have to be the best, it only has to be good enough. The average consumer will not notice anything. Especially if they are upgrading from USB 2 which was 10 times slower. USB 3.0 is faster than USB 2.0 by a factor of 10. Thunderbolt is only faster than USB 3.0 by a factor of two. Many people I know who are not very computer literate thought transfering 20 GB of data in 10 min was fast, simply because they upgraded from a system where that would take 25 min.
2. Where is 1 terabyte/sec coming from? Highest I heard was 100 gigabits (12.5 gigabytes/sec) and that was with fibre-optic cables which won't be out for several years. By the time anyone needs those speeds any computer made now will be a piece of crap. Assuming the motherboard/logicboard/hard drive/interface could even keep up. Lets keep the future in the future. Sure it would be great to have had a TV in ancient egypt but where would you plug it in? Or get reception?
3. All of the transmission bridge will need to be that fast. If your hard drive only writes at 100MB/sec then it won't matter what connection you use the fastest you will be able to read or write data will be 100MB/sec.
4. There is a natural conversion from DVD to Blu-ray for the purposes of home entertainment. Physical media will remain because it is so convenient (load, share, physical copies, no data caps, etc.) Is apple only delaying the inevitable (with no blu-ray support in macs?).
5. Remember that the fastest write/read speeds in your computer will be 6gbps as the hard drive interface is only sata 3.
6. They never did say anything about the future. It has great potential. Unfortunately, as of May 17, 2011 thunderbolt is effectively useless except for video display. Who knows when they will make more devices, then I imagine hp will jump on apple's bandwagon.
7. Space issues. The thunderbolt chip takes a lot of space and a pci express slot. I would rather have the 13 inch mbp with a discrete graphics card than thunderbolt. Especially as if they had waited a while they could have shrunken that card down/integrated it better. We would have a 13" mbp with no thunderbolt now (added next revision) with a dedicated graphics card. Thunderbolt could then be added with ivy bridge.

 

[Duluth Baptist]

HP does not work like Apple; it does not have a legion of die-hard fans who take every word of management as gospel, nor do they feel the need to fight battles in the same way as Jobs. If HP says they're not doing Thunderbolt now, that means they're not doing Thunderbolt now. That doesn't mean they won't add it later, and if they do nobody will notice that they "backtracked," as much as that could be considered one.

Apple sells drama, and so when Jobs says something people listen. And he doesn't like to backtrack. When he disdains USB3, you can bank on years of non-compatible devices. When he disses Flash, you can count on it not being included in iOS. He hasn't even trashed Blu-Ray but it still isn't coming to a Mac.

This looks a lot more like a Blu-Ray issue than a Flash issue; Apple doesn't have the muscle to win a hardware standards battle, and if they try to market Thunderbolt as an alternative to USB 3 Mac users are in for years of inconvenience. In my view they can coexist, but I'm not getting paid big bucks to sell consumer electronics.

 

[SilianRail]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

.....

Blu-ray was chosen for its DRM.

There was no consumer consideration in the decision.

DRM is a fool's game but I'm glad Blu Ray won.

 

[Fast Shadow]

Wait. HP makes something besides printers?

They make a damn fine server, that's for sure. Of course those happen to be based on the server line they acquired as part of Compaq.

 

[*LTD*]

So they're betting against Apple.

That's kind of a bad move these days. Oh well.

 

[flopticalcube]

Early days still for TB. HP will always be bench equipment to me. They made some of the best.

 

[AppleScruff1]

HP does not work like Apple; it does not have a legion of die-hard fans who take every word of management as gospel, nor do they feel the need to fight battles in the same way as Jobs. If HP says they're not doing Thunderbolt now, that means they're not doing Thunderbolt now. That doesn't mean they won't add it later, and if they do nobody will notice that they "backtracked," as much as that could be considered one.

Apple sells drama, and so when Jobs says something people listen. And he doesn't like to backtrack. When he disdains USB3, you can bank on years of non-compatible devices. When he disses Flash, you can count on it not being included in iOS. He hasn't even trashed Blu-Ray but it still isn't coming to a Mac.

This looks a lot more like a Blu-Ray issue than a Flash issue; Apple doesn't have the muscle to win a hardware standards battle, and if they try to market Thunderbolt as an alternative to USB 3 Mac users are in for years of inconvenience. In my view they can coexist, but I'm not getting paid big bucks to sell consumer electronics.

Good post.

 

[Mr Fusion]

HP... Cheap plastic Windows boxes backed by the finest outsourced technical support this side of the Ganges.

Funny... I'm not convinced of the value of Hewlett-Packard.

... COINCIDENCE?!?!?!?!?

 

[MorphingDragon]

They make a damn fine server, that's for sure. Of course those happen to be based on the server line they acquired as part of Compaq.

Their blades still suck compared to IBM and Oracle. Its a shame too, high density computing is becoming popular for virtualization, even in small businesses. So lazy engineers put businesses with subpar products because they lost the ability to think objectively about solutions when they got their Microsoft certification.

 

[TheSideshow]

HP... Cheap plastic Windows boxes backed by the finest outsourced technical support this side of the Ganges.

Funny... I'm not convinced of the value of Hewlett-Packard.

... COINCIDENCE?!?!?!?!?

Funny cuz my hp is magnesium and aluminum and they are the largest producer of computers.

Typed on a Tiny Keyboard

 

[35g700]

I don't think that Thunderbolt will catch on with the general public ever, and if it does it probably won't be for a while. USB 3.0 is 5.0Gbps which is way faster than most of the devices that will be using the port and it's backwards compatible with previous USB devices.

Thunderbolt seems like it would fit better for high end video editing/backing up HUGE amounts of data in the commercial world than it would for most people.

And it would be nice to see Apple put either a regular DVI or HDMI port on their laptops. They may not look pretty but I don't want to have to buy a $30 adapter to use DVI then pay another $30 for a VGA one and then have to carry them around so that I have them when I need them.

 

[mosx]

HDMI wasn't designed for PC Monitors, It's a home theater sepc.
Display port is the way forward in this area.

Doesn't matter. HDMI still offers higher resolutions than DisplayPort and more audio bandwidth. As someone who uses his PC on a high end monitor as well as playing the occasional game on my home theater system, I prefer HDMI. Especially since my GTX 460 provides 8 channel LPCM over HDMI.

HDMI 1.4 does NOT offer higher resolution than dp
http://www.tested.com/news/deciding-...yport-12/1191/

dp also offers nearly 2x as much data transfer as hdmi....

Uh, did you happen to read your link?

You might want to go back and re-read it.

It's not inferior. The previous poster commented that HDMI offers higher resolution, without mentioning the refresh rate.

That poster also misread their own link, where it clearly states that HDMI supports higher resolutions.

In what ways is DisplayPort inferior to HDMI?

Maximum resolution and audio support. HDMI supports significantly higher bit-rates for audio.

So if you had a desktop computer with plenty of PCI-E slots, you would buy a PCI-E card to supply USB 3. With Thunderbolt, someone could just create an adapter that has the functionality of the same PCI-E card, just in much smaller space. Well, to the end user it would be an "adapter". In reality, it would be a PCI-E card, except that it connects to the PCI-E cables inside the Thunderbolt cable, not the PCI-E in your computer.

Except that there are different speed PCIe slots. A PCIe x16 slot, for instance, currently offers 8GB/sec (64Gbps) of bandwidth. Which is more than 3x that of "dual channel" Thunderbolt.

Sony made the bold move by implementing it on their PS3 while no other device have it.

Even Microsoft that state they support HD-DVD didnt have the courage to implement it to their XBox360 as standard, they sold it as separate drive. Why? Were they scared?

Microsoft didn't impliment it because, if you remember, the "high end" PS3 cost $200 more than the "high end" Xbox 360 when both consoles were new/just launched. Microsoft made the Xbox 360 a game console first and everything else second. While Sony made the PS3 a blu-ray player first and everything else second. As a result, the Xbox 360 not only provides a significantly better gaming experience, it also has a significantly more powerful GPU. Proof? http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-call-of-duty-black-ops-faceoff http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-dead-redemption-face-off http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-modern-warfare-2-face-off
If you do some google searching, you'll find that right at PS3 launch, games that claimed to "use" blu-ray disc capacity like Resistance were actually filled with 17GB of dummy files to push the actual data files to the edge of the disc to help with PS3's downright terrible loading times. All these years later, it's a demonstrated fact that Sony made a mistake putting blu-ray as a priority instead of a higher end GPU.

So they pick Bluray, Toshiba given up their HD DVD support, and here we are enjoying Bluray on Playstation3 (Hero of Bluray) and BD players, which are plenty and cheaper now.

PS3 is NOT the hero of blu-ray, even though game sales and attach rates show that the first few years of PS3 sales were due to blu-ray and not games. I've never owned a PS3 and never will, yet I have multiple blu-ray players.

Blu-ray was chosen for its DRM.

What DRM exactly? Blu-ray is 100% plug and play just like DVDs were on both my PC and blu-ray players. You can't complain about HDCP DRM because Apple uses and REQUIRES it for iTunes HD video downloads. AACS and BD+? Completely transparent to the end user. You know how many times I've had to update the firmware in my blu-ray players or software on my PC to play a blu-ray disc? Never. Zero times.

There was no consumer consideration in the decision.

Really? How about the fact that blu-ray disc offers up to 45Mbps H.264 video? Or up to 8 channel uncompressed 24/192 audio?

Or convenience? It's significantly more convenient to go to a RedBox and rent the blu-ray disc for $1.50 than it is to spend $5 on an iTunes "HD" rental that takes hours to download even on the fastest connection, is half the resolution of a blu-ray disc, uses 1/10th video bit-rate with the same codec, and offers sub-DVD audio. Then theres the trouble of getting that video to your home theater display. Using a Mac? Better make sure you have all of the right cables and dongles and OS X's poor multi-display support doesn't get in the way.

 

[PlipPlop]

Doesn't matter. HDMI still offers higher resolutions than DisplayPort and more audio bandwidth. As someone who uses his PC on a high end monitor as well as playing the occasional game on my home theater system, I prefer HDMI. Especially since my GTX 460 provides 8 channel LPCM over HDMI.



Uh, did you happen to read your link?

You might want to go back and re-read it.



That poster also misread their own link, where it clearly states that HDMI supports higher resolutions.



Maximum resolution and audio support. HDMI supports significantly higher bit-rates for audio.



Except that there are different speed PCIe slots. A PCIe x16 slot, for instance, currently offers 8GB/sec (64Gbps) of bandwidth. Which is more than 3x that of "dual channel" Thunderbolt.



Microsoft didn't impliment it because, if you remember, the "high end" PS3 cost $200 more than the "high end" Xbox 360 when both consoles were new/just launched. Microsoft made the Xbox 360 a game console first and everything else second. While Sony made the PS3 a blu-ray player first and everything else second. As a result, the Xbox 360 not only provides a significantly better gaming experience, it also has a significantly more powerful GPU. Proof? http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-call-of-duty-black-ops-faceoff http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-dead-redemption-face-off http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-modern-warfare-2-face-off
If you do some google searching, you'll find that right at PS3 launch, games that claimed to "use" blu-ray disc capacity like Resistance were actually filled with 17GB of dummy files to push the actual data files to the edge of the disc to help with PS3's downright terrible loading times. All these years later, it's a demonstrated fact that Sony made a mistake putting blu-ray as a priority instead of a higher end GPU.



PS3 is NOT the hero of blu-ray, even though game sales and attach rates show that the first few years of PS3 sales were due to blu-ray and not games. I've never owned a PS3 and never will, yet I have multiple blu-ray players.



What DRM exactly? Blu-ray is 100% plug and play just like DVDs were on both my PC and blu-ray players. You can't complain about HDCP DRM because Apple uses and REQUIRES it for iTunes HD video downloads. AACS and BD+? Completely transparent to the end user. You know how many times I've had to update the firmware in my blu-ray players or software on my PC to play a blu-ray disc? Never. Zero times.



Really? How about the fact that blu-ray disc offers up to 45Mbps H.264 video? Or up to 8 channel uncompressed 24/192 audio?

Or convenience? It's significantly more convenient to go to a RedBox and rent the blu-ray disc for $1.50 than it is to spend $5 on an iTunes "HD" rental that takes hours to download even on the fastest connection, is half the resolution of a blu-ray disc, uses 1/10th video bit-rate with the same codec, and offers sub-DVD audio. Then theres the trouble of getting that video to your home theater display. Using a Mac? Better make sure you have all of the right cables and dongles and OS X's poor multi-display support doesn't get in the way.

We have a winner.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

What DRM exactly? Blu-ray is 100% plug and play just like DVDs were on both my PC and blu-ray players.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm a little confused. I've tried to play Blu-ray disks on a player and it said it wouldn't play unless I updated the bluray player's software. That sounds like DRM to me. Can you explain that?


If it helps I think the disk was Avatar and we didn't have the player hooked up to the Internet.

 

[djrobsd]

Wow. Once again it looks like us early adopters will get screwed by Apple... If Thunderbolt doesn't take off because the PC manufacturers don't follow suit, none of the device makers will make Thunderbolt devices (it will be a niche market dominated mostly by more expensive companies like La Cie and the like), and... I think... Apple will be forced to offer BOTH TB and USB 3.0 on all their machines... Then those of us who plopped down thousands of bucks recently for a new Macbook pro will be left in the dark with our USB 2.0 ports and a thunderbolt port that looks like THOR but with no mighty hammer to go with it.

Besides, Western Digital and all the mainstream players already make USB 3.0 drives.. such a shame Apple didn't include this in their refresh...

Oh well, I still LOVE my new sandy bridge machine, and I hope and pray that someone will come out with a cool little Thunderbolt hub that connects to USB 3.0 and other types of devices. I'm also looking forward to a thunderbolt docking station where all my stuff is hooked up and I just have to plug 1 wire.

 

[SeaFox]

Your ridiculous lol. HP is the number one PC vendor in the WORLD. To say they are not relevant is RIDICULOUS.

The number one PC vendor in the world used to be Dell until recently. What has Dell really done to contribute to the state of technology? Nothing. All "number one PC vendor in the world" means is they sell a lot of something. Gobble up enough competitors and price your wares cheap enough and you can be "#1" too. Doesn't mean you're actually relevant in the industry itself beyond your ability to strongarm component makers on pricing with your huge contracts.

 

[dukebound85]

Uh, did you happen to read your link?

You might want to go back and re-read it.



That poster also misread their own link, where it clearly states that HDMI supports higher resolutions.

I did... did you? I'll make it easy for you...

From wikipedia

HDMI 1.4 increases the maximum resolution to 4K × 2K (3840×2160p at 24 Hz/25 Hz/30 Hz and 4096×2160p at 24 Hz, which is a resolution used with digital theaters);

from the article

HDMI now supports resolutions up to 4096x2160, which is used in theaters with high-end digital projectors.

hmm so max seems to be 4096 x 2160 with 1.4a

Similarly display port 1.2 from the article

DisplayPort can handle a single display resolution up to 3840x2400

and from another article
http://www.ngohq.com/news/17076-vesa-introduces-displayport-1-2-a.html

DisplayPort 1.2 was designed to be compatible with existing DisplayPort systems and cables. To take advantage of the new capabilities, a PC will need to be DisplayPort 1.2 enabled, however existing standard cables can still be used, including those with the new Mini-DisplayPort connector. To achieve the 21.6 Gbps rate, the per-lane data rate is doubled from 2.7 Gbps to 5.4 Gbps, over the four lanes that exist in the standard cable. For a single display, this enables up to 3840 x 2400 resolution at 60Hz

Hmm, so max resolution is 3840 x 2400 at over twice the frequency that hdmi gets its max

Now I hope you can multiply and see that the display port results in greater max resolution.

 

[toke lahti]

HDMI wasn't designed for PC Monitors, It's a home theater sepc.
Display port is the way forward in this area.

Only ways that dp is way forward is that it's royalty free and uses more advanced tech (micro packets) than hdmi.
Former makes it cheaper, but latter evens the price.

The real advantage for hdmi is that it is found in every big screen (tv) and many small screens (pc monitor). Dp is much more rare and what good is connection when you can't connect to it?
Connector by itself is worthless.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Only ways that dp is way forward is that it's royalty free and uses more advanced tech (micro packets) than hdmi.
Former makes it cheaper, but latter evens the price.

The real advantage for hdmi is that it is found in every big screen (tv) and many small screens (pc monitor). Dp is much more rare and what good is connection when you can't connect to it?
Connector by itself is worthless.

DisplayPort dominates the high end computing spectrum. By the trickle effect that hardware companies use to develop their models, DP will be in mass consumer hands within a couple of years.

 

[toke lahti]

Wow. Once again it looks like us early adopters will get screwed by Apple... If Thunderbolt doesn't take off because the PC manufacturers don't follow suit, none of the device makers will make Thunderbolt devices (it will be a niche market dominated mostly by more expensive companies like La Cie and the like), and... I think... Apple will be forced to offer BOTH TB and USB 3.0 on all their machines... Then those of us who plopped down thousands of bucks recently for a new Macbook pro will be left in the dark with our USB 2.0 ports and a thunderbolt port that looks like THOR but with no mighty hammer to go with it.

Funny thing here is that the situation is pretty much same that blu-ray's in a Mac.
Bd's are still rare in new computers and this explanation suits Jobs for not to include bd. TB is even more rare, but suddenly it doesn't matter and it has to be included, even if there would be many more important things exluded (usb3, discrete gpu in 13" mbp, hmmm, maybe they don't like to sell any 13" mbp anymore, since it has this bad thing called optical drive and that's why they didn't even bother to upgrade it's screen to air's 1440 x 900, they want to sell only air @13" and to be able to say that people don't want to use optical drives...) because of this.
Both are still very expensive and will be expensive to use for near future, but once again price doesn't matter in the other case.

Also it's firewire case once again.
What might be the ratio of different devices offered in fw vs. usb? 1000:1?
Who would like to have computer with only fw and without usb?
Fast forward to today and who would like to own computer for the next 5 years without up-to-date usb3 sockets when all the other world around is using them? Not today, but 2013 will. So macs will loose their value faster than pc's in the future?
History also tells us, that Apple newer speeded their slow usb drivers, because they wanted to thriumph fw.
All these years windows users have had faster usb than mac users.
(And this is why they don't complain that their scanner is slower with usb than with fw.)
If history repeats itself, macs are now stuck with usb2, only because otherwise Jobs cannot emphasise the need for TB.
Fact will remain even in 2015 99.9% of uses, usb3 will do as good as TB.

Question about TB:
it is bi-directional & has two pipes: dp & data, both 10Gbit/s both ways.
What is 10Gbit/s return channel of dp used? Nothing?
Should we then call TB having 30 Gbit bandwidth?

 

[rovex]

In 3 years time apparently 50gbps Thunderbolt will make its way into the mac's, but what exactly would you need that speed for? That's 16 and half times as much (and faster??) as USB 3.0, that's insane.

 

[OllyW]

If history repeats itself, macs are now stuck with usb2, only because otherwise Jobs cannot emphasise the need for TB.
Fact will remain even in 2015 99.9% of uses, usb3 will do as good as TB.

Next year Intel's Ivy Bridge chipset will support both Thunderbolt and USB 3.

Intel see Thunderbolt as a complement to USB 3, not a replacement so Apple will have to go out of their way not to support both standards.

 

[mosx]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm a little confused. I've tried to play Blu-ray disks on a player and it said it wouldn't play unless I updated the bluray player's software. That sounds like DRM to me. Can you explain that?


If it helps I think the disk was Avatar and we didn't have the player hooked up to the Internet.

Thats not DRM, thats your player needing an update. Is it DRM when you need to update OS X to a newer version to run a newer version of iTunes? Or when you need to update an Xbox 360 or PS3 to newer version? No. Thats just needing an update.

Plus Avatar is one of those discs that does peak at over 40Mbps video with lossless audio, so its no surprise that your blu-ray player would need some sort of update.

hmm so max seems to be 4096 x 2160 with 1.4a

Similarly display port 1.2 from the article

and from another article
http://www.ngohq.com/news/17076-vesa...ort-1-2-a.html

Hmm, so max resolution is 3840 x 2400 at over twice the frequency that hdmi gets its max

Now I hope you can multiply and see that the display port results in greater max resolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Technical_specifications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Version_1.4

DisplayPort was updated AFTER HDMI 1.4 to support the same maximum resolution, 3840x2160. However, HDMI also supports 4096x2160, for wider aspect ratios. I sure hope you can multiply.

HDMI also supports other neat things that DisplayPort doesn't, like MLP (DVD-Audio) as well as DSD (SACD).

You should go to the "official" website for HDMI and read about all of the neat video, audio, and networking features HDMI offers. Those of us with PCs that can do something than be more than expensive fashion accessories appreciate the fact that HDMI is a standard feature. My PC can easily be transformed from a work machine to an entertainment machine that plays blu-ray discs with 8 channel LPCM, it can play games with better graphics than the Xbox 360 at double the resolution and frame-rate with better uncompressed 8 channel LPCM audio than the PS3 (and even more significantly better graphics than the PS3).

Apple's implementation of DisplayPort can't do that since they don't provide proper Windows drivers and Apple's implementation of audio over DisplayPort seems to be FUBAR and all of the mDP to HDMI adapters that do support audio from mDP don't seem to properly support LPCM or anything other than bitstreaming old DVD quality AC3 and DTS. Not only that, but good luck finding a system that can actually take audio in from DisplayPort without some sort of conversion to HDMI first.

It sure is nice finally having a computer that doesn't require me to use half-baked standards and a billion different dongles to do what I want or need it to do

 

[fat jez]

Intel aren't stupid. They've spent a lot of money developing Lightpeak/Thunderbolt and want to see it picked up. Who better to champion it than the darling of the computer world, Apple? (We don't know what deals they offered Apple to include it and yes, I know Apple co-developed it, but would they have done so on their own? I think not.) If Intel can get other big names like Sony, Toshiba, etc to use it as well, they're home and dry. The Asus' of this world would be unlikely to stick it on their low-end laptops, but I don't believe this is Intel's target market anyway.

Apple including it hasn't really cost us much - we can still connect up to high res displays (I connect both my 2011 Macbook Pro's to a 2560x1440 Dell U2711 via displayport) and if Thunderbolt flops, it's not as though we've lost USB ports to make way for it. The worst we've lost is the ability to use a 2011 iMac as a target display for a non-2011 Mac. Sure, it's only displayport 1.1 and not 1.2 now, but there's sufficient bandwidth for us to continue using external displays as we were before.

 

[KnightWRX]

Intel aren't stupid. If Intel can get other big names like Sony

Looks like Intel did and looks like Sony just fragmented the whole standard by using a different connector than Apple and by mating their implementation to the USB ports instead of the display ports.

So now we have Apple ThunderBolt using MDP and using up the bandwidth allotted to your displays (and requires unplugging your display each time you want to plug in a new device) and we have Sony's Thunderbolt, using a USB plug, which seems all-around better since it's independant of your monitor, potentially not robbing you of pixel pushing bandwidth and not requiring a monitor disconnect every time you want to plug in a new device.

Let the Thunderbolt implementation wars start!

In light of this, I think HP's move is quite intelligent. Wait and see what comes out on top.