Apparently, Mavericks supports IP over Thunderbolt. What does that even mean? You can link multiple machines through Thunderbolt under 1 ip address? What is the use for this?
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IP over Thunderbolt
- Thread starter portishead
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It means that thunderbolt will be able to act like an ethernet cable, I assume. Transmit/receive TCP/IP packets.
Hrm. Someone needs to come out with a 20gbps Thunderbolt 2 switch.
10GbE and Fibre Channel is stupid expensive.
10GbE and Fibre Channel is stupid expensive.
8CoreWhore
macrumors 68030
paronga
macrumors regular
oh come on. that's not how it works.
Thunderbolt is PCI-e over a cable. Not a ****ing network protocol. Just like there isn't a PCI-e switch, there wont be a thunderbolt one.
Same as with FireWire. You can directly coonect two Mac using Thunderbolt cable and it will act as a network between these two Macs.
Second that. Even though Thunderbolt carries PCI-E bus signals, it can definitely be used to implement Ethernet on top of PCI-E bus.
From the network settings, we can see that you can connect two Mac with a Thunderbolt cable and setup peer to peer IP network. I don't have a cable on hand, cannot confirm that.
Actually, Thunderbolt is not PCI Express over a cable. Thunderbolt is a high-throughput, low-latency packet switching fabric. Both DisplayPort and PCI Express protocols are implemented on top of the Thunderbolt protocol. Thunderbolt packets can be routed over multiple Thunderbolt controllers, so it is actually correct to call Thunderbolt a network protocol (https://thunderbolttechnology.net/tech/how-it-works).
However, in practice, a Thunderbolt switch will simply be a tiny computer with lots of Thunderbolt ports. The routing will happen in software at IP layer (it cant happen at Thunderbolt layer since Intel has not yet designed multi-port Thunderbolt controllers, just dual-port).
In fact, Mac Pro is exactly such a Thunderbolt switch, with Mavericks supporting IP over Thunderbolt (its called Thunderbolt Bridge in System Preferences Network pane). In December, youll be able to hook up, say, six MacBook Pros to a Mac Pro using StarTechs 3 m or Cornings 10 m cables and enjoy 20 Gbps networking for the cost of cables. All software that works over IP (SMB, iSCSI, etc.) will just work with this setup.
Not everyone will want to buy a Mac Pro for this, so I can see some company making a Thunderbolt IP switch with, say, 10 ports for $1000. If this thing becomes popular, the price can get as low as $200$300 (Intels Thunderbolt 2 controllers are just $13 for two ports).