Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Intel Says Fiber Optic Thunderbolt Cables Coming Later This Year
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I wonder if the replacement for the Apple 30 pin connector (parallel serial) will actually be a TB connection with a tiny form factor? Yep.
Rocketman
1. Massive ecosystem and deployments
2. Parallel copper for power
3. Suitable for devices as small as a watch
Rocketman
1. Massive ecosystem and deployments
2. Parallel copper for power
3. Suitable for devices as small as a watch
Last edited:
This, This and more this...
If you consider the costs involved in getting distance between quiet work and noisy equipment then a tens of meters Thunderbolt cable could be $150 or $300 and still be a cheap and effective way to get it work.
If with these long cables we also see things like a TB hub or a TB - SFP connector. Then Thunderbolts role in bring Clusters within the realm of the SOHO market will be massive.
I think for most Consumer uses then USB or better still wireless will win out.
*Yes I know Thunberbolt in these cases would just be NIC on the hub end of the cable.
Fiber Cable expensive? no it is not.
http://www.fiberoptics4sale.com/c/Simplex-OM3-MM-Fiber-Cable.html
$0.80 /meter
Apple TB cable 2m is $49
Amazing.
I'm not sure what will happen to it. Looking at typical areas where thunderbolt has been implemented thus far like drives and displays, most of these are not designed as Apple only peripherals, so I have to wonder if the Windows side will be able to drive adoption. You'd need some presence in laptops given that many of these functions can be accomplished with greater bandwidth inside of a tower already.
The only point there would be to spread adoption. The NAND used in those devices is very slow. It's nothing compared to a typical ssd.
This topic comes up quite a lot. Even then it only really works for things that can be functionally split up. Anything you're expecting to run in near real time would be impractical in such a situation.
You should return it and put the $$$ to good use... like maybe purchase 1/11th of a share of AAPL.
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/9B179 Safari/7534.48.3)
So glad Thunderbolt was invented!
Not so glad it hasn't been adopted too much yet. I have a MacBook Air with it which is great, but not so great when there's next to no accessories to use with it!
So glad Thunderbolt was invented!
Not so glad it hasn't been adopted too much yet. I have a MacBook Air with it which is great, but not so great when there's next to no accessories to use with it!
It's not symmetric like that. If Apple had done USB 3 *first* then there would be no complaints about Thunderbolt coming later. The *functionality* is what people are complaining about, not simply this-or-that. I have been able to move data quickly and inexpensively with my PC for a year - good for backups but great for restores and searching. I had to buy a giant $1000 Pegasus R4 to get the same functionality I've had with a tiny $300 USB 3 rig.
----------
I know it doesn't work for everyone, but I have a TB Display for my Air and I really like that it has GbE, extra USB ports and power. It is a very useful TB peripheral. However, I think the MBA itself has a lame design with the power and TB ports being on opposite sides.
I have a 27" 3.4 ghz iMac running a Pegasus thunderbolt 8tb raid with a BlackMagic thunderbolt Intensity Extreme.
If you don't need thunderbolt then it's not for you. Just like eSATA. Stick to USB or FW800. I think Fw800 will be around awhile. In the video biz the LaCie rugged 1 tb drive with FW800 is the industry standard copying or shooting files to in the field.
Thunderbolt has been an amazing cost saver. Previously I had to buy a $3500 MacPro just to edit video and have the ability to buy a $200 eSata card and eSata raid. I also needed it so I could install a input/output/capture card. With TB, I can do this on a $2000 iMac without buying an eSata card.
I would like to develop a ThunderBolt hub with 3 to 5 PCI-e slot that I can expand my MBP, adding video card, capture card, PCI-e SSD, RAID card, etc.
Anyone wants to see TB to PCI-e Switch?
Anyone wants to see TB to PCI-e Switch?
not sure what you have for a 300 dollar usb 3 rig that matches the 1000 dollar Pegasus 4 rig.
4 1tb drives right now are about 440 new. a 4 bay sansdigital usb 3 costs 335. this would total 775 and not be as fast as the pegasus would be. you would need a usb 3 card with a port multiplier and be in the
850 range when done. as you stated the pegasus r 4 is 1k plus 50 for the cable.
also the pegasus has a 3 year warranty and the sans Digital has a 1 year warranty. plus the Pegasus has an onboard chip which lets the cpu do other work
having used both the Pegasus at 1050 vs the sans digital at 875. the Pegasus wins by a little but it wins.
yes pegasus r6 t-bolt allowed me to sell my mac pro and use a mac mini server instead.
cost is 2300 vs 3600 .
I have 4 2tb hdds 2 ssd in the Pegasus. along with 2 750 gb hdds in the server.
Except that they are "Apple cables", and Apple almost never lowers the price on anything - in spite of rapidly dropping prices from the suppliers on most things that Apple sells.
T-Bolt is a train wreck....
You won't be able to add all that stuff with current TB implementation. TB is simply 1 lane of PCIe for data and 1 lane for video. Good luck adding all those things.
Fiber Cable expensive? no it is not.
http://www.fiberoptics4sale.com/c/Simplex-OM3-MM-Fiber-Cable.html
$0.80 /meter
Apple TB cable 2m is $49
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
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
It's 4 lanes of PCIe 1.0, plus roughly equal bandwidth for DisplayPort.
But still a train-wreck - climb aboard!
I agree - syncing videos to my iPhone / iPad is painfully slow, and there's no way that it's the USB speed that's responsible.
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 stand corrected:
All current Thunderbolt controllers have connections for 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0, including the MacBook Air. All Thunderbolt ports provide two 10Gbps, bi-directional channels over a single cable. They all operate at the same speed. The full 10Gbps is available to the underlying protocol (PCIe or DP) with no 8b/10b overhead.
The bottleneck is that all current Thunderbolt controllers only appear to have a single PCIe to Thunderbolt protocol adapter. Even though this protocol adapter has a PCIe 2.0 x4 back end, it only has a single 10Gbps frontside connection to the on-chip Thunderbolt switch. PCIe 2.0 sans 8b/10b runs at 4Gbps. 10/4 = 2.5. The 1250MB/s PCIe throughput a Thunderbolt controller is capable of is equivalent to 2.5 lanes of PCIe 2.0.
If there aren't other devices in the Thunderbolt chain sharing the PCIe bandwidth, an external GPU solution could probably yield some fairly impressive performance gains nonetheless.
...its still not a train wreck though. Question, do you have (or have need of) any thunderbolt devices?
One good number to gauge the adoption rate of a new interface is ports shipped. Apple has shipped 17.8m Macs in the past 4 quarters, the vast majority of which had Thunderbolt controllers. Only 30m USB 3.0 controllers were shipped in the first 18 months after SuperSpeed USB came to market. So Apple and Intel have done pretty well in a year's time.
And yes, Intel and MSI have both produced Thunderbolt equipped Z77 motherboards, and Asus and Acer have indicated that they are interested in supporting the technology as well.
Thunderbolt is a meta-protocol for wrapping PCIe and DisplayPort packets. Since iOS devices don't support PCIe or DisplayPort, why exactly would you want to make them "compatible"? The size and power draw of the current generation of Thunderbolt controllers also makes this idea laughable. Why not have Apple add eSATA or 10GBASE-T ports while they're at it.
Show me a 2m copper cable that can handle 2 channels of 10 Gbps full-duplex for much less than $49. There is a lot to the Thunderbolt cable spec, and it's not just the fact that it's an active design. You can read more about it through Apple's patent application: http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...al-thunderbolt-is-headed-for-ios-devices.html
(note that I totally disagree with Patently Apple's title for this article and their assessment that Thunderbolt would be headed to iOS devices any time soon.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet
PoE can transfer data and power up to 100 meters and it is old tech already and 10 gigabyte standard is under development
More cables
How often are PoE PSE's ultraportable notebook PC's? PoE delivers 12.95-34.20 W at 44-57 V, 350-600 mA. Thunderbolt provides only 10 W and at considerably lower voltages (3.3-15 V). The power loss over a 100m cable would make it thoroughly impractical for an interface driven by a notebook PC.
Fiber Cable expensive? no it is not.
http://www.fiberoptics4sale.com/c/Simplex-OM3-MM-Fiber-Cable.html
$0.80 /meter
Apple TB cable 2m is $49
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.
Thunderbolt is not 1 lane of PCIe for data and 1 lane for video. It is 2x 10 Gbps channels, but they can both carry PCIe or display data. Total PCIe traffic is limited to 10 Gbps at this time because there appears to only be a single PCIe to Thunderbolt protocol adapter in the current generation of Thunderbolt host controllers. That is still the equivalent of 2.5 lanes of PCIe 2.0. Granted that's not a ton to play with, but it's still half the bandwidth that the southbridge has to the CPU on Sandy Bridge systems. When you look at how much crap some OEMs hang off of the southbridge on their motherboards, it seems less crazy.
Sorry, I'll be more clear. I'm not comparing the highest performance threshold of each solution, but rather the length I had to go to get "good" performance (native drive performance) given what my MBA was born with vs. my Thinkpad. My 2 x 7200RPM 2TB drives in a USB 3.0 RAID 0 ok-if-it-dies enclosure was $300. My MBA has USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt. Last year, my ONLY option for getting > USB 2.0 was the R4.
That is, I'm not comparing the devices in their best form, I'm saying that to get any kind of modern performance I had to LEAP over the chasm and spend $1000 to get at least equivalent performance on a Mac. That is why I and many others would not be complaining if Apple had gone USB 3.0 then Thunderbolt.
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.
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.
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.
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.