Intel Details Thunderbolt Spec: New Chips Coming Next Year, But What About Fiber Optic Cables?

[repoman27]

I completely agree with you and maybe I am just frustrated to have this great port for no apparent personal use (got an display and don't need a raid drive). If Apple would have at least offered an adaptor at the same time THAN I can understand it. But putting it in there, offering ONE periphery device themselves only months later and otherwise hyper-expensive hardware doesn't cut it. At least provide adaptors FROM THE START so that the port is usable. Currently I lost a port.

How did you lose a port? Virtually every PC on the market has a video out port on it somewhere, yours just happens to have a little lightning bolt near it. Maybe in the future, you'll even find a use for some of its other capabilities.

You do realize that there are scads of $6 adapters already on the market that allow you to connect virtually any display out there to your TB port?

 

[gri]

How did you lose a port? Virtually every PC on the market has a video out port on it somewhere, yours just happens to have a little lightning bolt near it. Maybe in the future, you'll even find a use for some of its other capabilities.

You are right, I may not have lost a port as the display port was always there... But at least an adaptor would have been nice so I can use the advantages of the port already, lets say an adaptor to give me a display and a USB or firewire port. You must agree though that the offer of current peripherals is more than meager at the moment.

 

[jsolares]

You are right, I may not have lost a port as the display port was always there... But at least an adaptor would have been nice so I can use the advantages of the port already, lets say an adaptor to give me a display and a USB or firewire port. You must agree though that the offer of current peripherals is more than meager at the moment.

The 27" thunderbolt display gives you ports, the IDF announced belkin dock for TB gives you ports

 

[AidenShaw]

future tense...

The 27" thunderbolt display gives you ports, the IDF announced belkin dock for TB gives you ports

The display "will give you ports" when it ships, and the Belkin dock "will give you ports" when it ships.

 

[G4er?]

When the connectors are mounted vertically on the computer does the left side or the right side have the seam? Is there an industry standard? You can't tell by feel like other connectors which way it should go. When the connector is on the back it is difficult to look for the seam (since Apple thinks only Mac Pro users need connectors on the front).

 

[sennekuyl]

The PC world would still be using PS/2 if Apple hadn't so hugely expanded the market.

They *are* still using PS2, work just received a bunch of new computers and they still have the 2 (!) PS2 ports. Getting PS2 devices still isn't hard.

 

[Henriok]

The USB connector has a visible metal shield wrapped around the contacts for protection and electromagnetic shielding. The seam on that shield is on the bottom. Once you see the shield, you simply position it's seam on the bottom and plug it in.

That's all fine and well (well, its not, it's bloody obscure), but USB-ports are regularly found to be oriented in any of the four directions negating any point of knowing what direction the connector is oriented.

And the B-plug is just moronic..

 

[repoman27]

You are right, I may not have lost a port as the display port was always there... But at least an adaptor would have been nice so I can use the advantages of the port already, lets say an adaptor to give me a display and a USB or firewire port. You must agree though that the offer of current peripherals is more than meager at the moment.

I do agree... There are, I believe, three currently shipping Thunderbolt devices, and one of those only started shipping yesterday. But when we get down to brass tacks here, the longest anyone has had a Mac to which they could even attach a TB device is just 6 months. There aren't a pile of TB reference designs lying around to allow people to start cranking out devices with minimal lead time. There are not a lot of controller chips in the supply chain either. (To quote another Intel slide, "Intel is taking steps to broaden enabling to meet the demand in 2012." Which sounds a lot like, "Sorry we've been coming up a little short so far.") The devices announced or shipping aren't like cases for a new iPhone or covers for an iPad—there's actual technology in them. Also, with a new interface like this, some actual innovation is required to come up with new and useful applications for it.

These things take some time, be patient. 18 months from now, people may well be singing a different tune about Thunderbolt.

 

[okwhatev]

I can't believe there STILL isn't an external PCICMA card slot adapter for thunderbolt. I know at least 30 people that would immediately order such a device, as it means we could use any readily available PCI-E card device with our thunderbolt computers and instantly have eSATA, firewire 400, USB3 or whatever interface we wanted or needed to plug into our devices INSTANTLY, natively, and at full spec. I'm growing severely impatient. Does anyone know where someone applies to get the thunderbolt chips to even create such a device if you were a hardware manufacture? Let's create such a device! Who's with me?!

 

[ARobinson]

When will we see a PCIe card?

 

[waldobushman]

This is a problem

Given Apple's penchant for moving to new technologies only when it is apparent that the new technologies are stable, immanent, future-proof, I find the opinion that fiber optic is years away to be problematic.

That Apple would use Thunderbolt now, rather than USB 3.0, for example, when Thunderbolt doesn't seem ready for prime-time is surprising.

Did Intel oversell Thunderbolt to Apple or did Apple simply blow it?

 

[ct2k7]

Given Apple's penchant for moving to new technologies only when it is apparent that the new technologies are stable, immanent, future-proof, I find the opinion that fiber optic is years away to be problematic.

That Apple would use Thunderbolt now, rather than USB 3.0, for example, when Thunderbolt doesn't seem ready for prime-time is surprising.

Did Intel oversell Thunderbolt to Apple or did Apple simply blow it?

We're already using fibre optic in our communications today.

 

[vitzr]

speed increase

+1

 

[puckhead193]

so in english this means no new mac pros until 2012

 

[ct2k7]

so in english this means no new mac pros until 2012

No.

 

[MattInOz]

They *are* still using PS2, work just received a bunch of new computers and they still have the 2 (!) PS2 ports. Getting PS2 devices still isn't hard.

But did they come with a PS2 Mouse and keyboard?
I'm pretty sure some of them still do.

 

[sennekuyl]

But did they come with a PS2 Mouse and keyboard?
I'm pretty sure some of them still do.

Well, this batch didn't but early 2010 saw ps2 mice come with new computers. So yeah, they do at times. Maybe they are just off loading the 'old' stock to us in Australia... dunno.

 

[MattInOz]

For people who would pay all outdoors for a Thunderbolt to 10 GbE or Fibre Channel adapter, or A/V pros with obscene budgets, there could be a good reason to put some distance between you and your Thunderbolt attached device. (I'm thinking research labs, data centers, movie sets, recording studios...) TB is not really about HDDs so much as it is about fringe applications.

Exactly the Thunderbolt Optical cables will be measured in their cost competitiveness with other methods of attaching a computer to a SAN (fibre channel or otherwise) or Cluster, not against the short run uses.

Given Thunderbolt will allow Laptops and smaller quieter desktops to connect as full class citizens. Then companies can look at how much redundant capacity needs to be on each desktop and how much can be provided in a central pool for everyone to use (and very noisy location).

It really is about as capturing as many fringe applications in to one bus that could then be on commodity hardware (ie. cheaper more options).

 

[Judas1]

Apple is kinda silly how they cherry pick the technology they support. The 2011 macbook air has no usb 3.0 port but has a thunderbolt port. Usb is a proven technology with many peripherals already on the market. While thunderbolt appears to be great, many have said that you won't see peripherals till maybe 18 months later. Wouldn't it make more sense to include usb 3.0 for the 2011 mba, and wait till 2012 to add the thunderbolt port? Many people might see this move as Apple leading the market, but in all actually, they jsut have terrible timing. Usb is not going anywhere. Usb 3.0 will be supported in Ivy Bridge. They need to support current technology first before they add support for a future technology. I bet many, many people would love to trade in their Tb for usb 3.0.

 

[sporadicMotion]

Not so facetious as you might think. I worked at a CompUSA when the original iMac was released. Windows PCs had had USB ports for a few years at that point (since early in the Win95 cycle), and Windows (as bought on a PC) had basic USB support since Win95 OSR3, OSR3.1 and OSR3.5. It was the release of the iMac that brought USB devices into the mainstream. About 90% of the USB devices came in 'bondi blue and/or frosted white' color schemes. (Including a number of printers!)

Believe, me I remember the complaints from the beige-box crowd about the color scheme on so many mice and joysticks. This was, of course, back before the 'everything has to be black!' craze hit the PC side of the market, when an internal CD-ROM drive with a black faceplate cost $5-15 more than the identical beige faceplate version.

How do you figure the iMac brought anything to the mainstream at that point in time? The market was 99.9% pc at that point. PC users made USB mainstream, the iMac just brought it to mac users.

 

[AidenShaw]

I bet many, many people would love to trade in their Tb for usb 3.0.

And someday, when they're actually able to buy disks with TBolt connections, they'll look at the price difference between a disk with a USB 3.0 interface and the same disk with a TBolt interface and wonder "what was Apple thinking"....

TBolt is will be a wonderful interface for docking stations (and other aggregators), high bandwidth storage, and special (audio/video) interfaces. It will also be a great way for a small portable with weak graphics to connect an external discrete GPU to the system - although I'm gobsmacked that Apple didn't include the option for an MXM video card in the TBolt display for that purpose.

For someone looking for a fast external HDD or two, though, USB 3.0 is king and will remain king.

 

[Judas1]

For someone looking for a fast external HDD or two, though, USB 3.0 is king and will remain king.

Currently I'm really feeling the slow speed of USB 2.0 when transferring movie files to and from an external drive. USB 3.0 would be so sweet. I've mentioned before that a good setup with the MBA is 128 Gb SSD (SSD are still too expensive) with an large external HD for media files. USB 3.0 would go a long way to making this setup better.

 

[sennekuyl]

How do you figure the iMac brought anything to the mainstream at that point in time? The market was 99.9% pc at that point. PC users made USB mainstream, the iMac just brought it to mac users.

Because the most available usb mice were from Apple and it wasn't unusual to see a hockey puck around?

 

[heisetax]

Up or Down?

USB has got to be the worst design for a connector ever as far as the shape. There's no easy way to see which way the thing should be inserted. I don't even care if it's Apple's standard that's adopted so long as it's a standard where I can simply look and see which way the cable should be inserted.QUOTE]

The USB connector has a visible metal shield wrapped around the contacts for protection and electromagnetic shielding. The seam on that shield is on the bottom. Once you see the shield, you simply position it's seam on the bottom and plug it in.

But what is up & what is down. Not aso USB connectors are put in the same way. Some are even vertical. One sometimes still have to look to see on which side the bar is to make the plug work in only one orientation. I wish your way would always work. And work in the dark.

 

[heisetax]

Which one was it really?

How do you figure the iMac brought anything to the mainstream at that point in time? The market was 99.9% pc at that point. PC users made USB mainstream, the iMac just brought it to mac users.

Other than your 99.9% of the computers being pc which is a little high, your other statement that PC users made USB mainstream needs some more explaining. It is a given fact that USB was available on Windows PCs at least 2 years before USB was available on Macs. But that's as far as anything is really clear & positive.

I sold computers for a few years at this time. In fact I probably sold the first iBook in Omaha, NE. Even though Windows computers had USB ports on them they came with PS2 keyboards & mice. Not only that it was the rare Windows PC that would boot without a PS2 keyboard &/or PS2 mouse. It took most of that time to convince these Windows users not to purchase parallel printers & parallel scanners. The main sales of USB devices was to Mac users as the Mac would work with them while the Windows machines would not always. Even with all of the problems of connecting multiple parallel devices to one computer it was a very hard sell to replace them with USB devices.

Because of the much larger number of Windows computers it would be easy to give all of the credits for USB devices to Windows, but it really wasn't until the iMac started using USB devices that USB became popular enough for Windows users, (usually crowd followers), to go with USB. The Windows Geeks that used USB as soon as it was on Windows computers did not control what other Windows users used. Even though the Mac had much smaller numbers, it added to the Windows Geeks gave a big enough market for USB devices. And then the mainstream Windows users finally saw that even USB1 was easier to use than parallel & the older serial methods.

So even though it took years for USB to replace the keyboard & pointing device from the much older PS2 scheme of things, the large number of Window users made up for the limited use in the early years of USB.

To me it was the early Windows Geeks, followed on by the iMacs that lead to the USB expansion. Then slowly the rest of the Windows users were converted. As with most things on these forums both sides of a discussion have their correct points while they seem to still have some incorrect points.