Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
No, each Channel can carry 10 Gbps. There's 2 Channels in TB. What are you talking about ?

TB is 20 Gbps bi-directional, but guess what, DP is uni-directional. Monitors don't push back that much data to a computer.

You've been confused this whole thread.
2gS1J.png


Thunderbolt is a combination of DisplayPort and a PCI Express x4 connection. Thunderbolt uses two 10-Gbps channels; each channel has two bidirectional lanes, for a total of 40 Gbps, according to Aviel Yogev, director of Thunderbolt engineering.

It's actually 2 channels, 10Gbps birectional. So in summation you have potential for up to 20Gbps upstream AND 20Gbps downstream, but any single device maxes out at 10Gbps (you don't "combine" the two channels)

I guess you know more than the guy who invented the **** too huh?
 
You are really just being a pessamist trying to find every little thing you can about TB to complain about.

How is that any different (on the other end of the spectrum) of you continually praising Apple in threads like this? :rolleyes:

To me, it's just a computer. I own several, including a dedicated Windows machine and a MBP that has Windows and OSX on it (although that Windows doesn't get much use).

Your issue with the monitor being last is probably relevant for, well, pretty much nobody.... How many people need or can even afford to have 3 TB drives between their computer and monitor? And if you do have 3 TB drives

I guess you don't know much about hard drive prices. A 3TB external USB3 drive can be had for $130-160 or so (I just bought two of them in the past couple of months, one at $160 and another a month later at $130 on sale). That's DIRT CHEAP compared to hard drive prices in the past. I use one to backup the other and have it at 2.5TB full already (easy to do if your entire media collection is on it; I have 600+ movies in SD and HD, 6000+ songs, 5500+ high resolution photos and dozens of TV shows). I would have purchased 6TB drives if they had been available. I'll have to eventually buy another set of 3TB drives or use an array.

This will become more and more commonplace in the future as everything is made and distributed digitally. I may use BD to make HD transfers, but I have no interest in using discs with menus, warnings, previews, etc. when I can just play the movie and select it off a list.

hooked up, how many situations do you need to pull out a drive in the middle?

I pull my notebook backup drives out every time I make a backup. It's not a good idea to leave them connected if they are removable as they are getting wear at idle speeds, power running through them etc., and if some kind of worm/trojan/virus/clumsiness of a famly member, etc. were to erase the backup along with the original, the entire point of the backup would be lost. I also like to keep an off-site backup (meaning I'll need a 3rd 3TB drive soon as well. It's just too much information to to replace. I spent a year transferring VHS tapes, Laserdiscs and scanning/cleaning up photos. I don't ever want to have to do it again).

The whole point of a removable drive is that you can connect it when needed and then remove it. They get removed even more often on a notebook than a desktop. This idea that hardly anyone will ever need to connect/disconnect their TB devices is ludicrous. Every time I move my MBP from my music studio to its den dock or take it on a trip, etc., it gets connected/disconnected between various devices (many Firewire) and setups. Daisy-chaining is a poor setup, IMO. It's much better to have a hub. I mean we used to have daisy-chained light bulbs for Christmas trees (series) and it was a mess. Parallel chains are normally a better way to go.

If you are going to have to pull out a drive you should know it ahead of time, it's not like all of a sudden you are just going to need the second drive in the chain for some reason. Plan ahead and put it as the last one on the

How do you know what someone else may need? :rolleyes:

Your attitude is honestly quite annoying, you just read all of the articles and

Leave it to fanboys to tell logical people how annoying they are. Guess what guy? The feeling is probably mutual. :cool:
 
Guess we were both wrong then. It's still 10 Gbps to DP 1.2's 21 Gbps, still half the bandwidth. Still a big problem. End. of. Story.
umm where was i wrong, i said that you have 10Gbps to ONE monitor, if you hooked up TWO monitors you would have 20Gbps because each lane is bidirectional. Since the monitor doesn't need to send data back to the computer, as you even stated, it can use both lanes to send data to two monitors at 20Gbps.

Also DP 1.2 is 4 channel unidirectional with each channel pushing 5.4Gbps for 21Gbps total. IF thunderbolt can use the PCI-E channel as well you would have 40Gbps being pushed to monitors, I'm researching right now to see if I can find anything to state if this is possible.

In the meantime.... I still want to know what you are doing that 1 monitor needs more than 10Gbps?

Uh, promise you that DisplayPort isn't bidirectional (video portion). Didn't say that Thunderbolt wasn't. I said DisplayPort isn't (again the video carrying portion).
ok so regardless if it has 2 bidirectional lanes or 2 unidirectional lanes it still can pass data along at 20Gbps and since it only pushes it in ONE direction, it is irrelevant if that channel is bi-directional or not.

However since the guy in charge of TB engineering said "EACH channel has 2 BI-directional lanes" I'll tend to believe his quote rather than some guy on a forum.
 
Last edited:
How is that any different (on the other end of the spectrum) of you continually praising Apple in threads like this? :rolleyes:
i'm having a discussion about the technology, where did i praise apple? He is saying it won't work because of data on the same stream as video... not true.


I guess you don't know much about hard drive prices. A 3TB external USB3 drive can be had for $130-160 or so (I just bought two of them in the past couple of months, one at $160 and another a month later at $130 on sale). That's DIRT CHEAP compared to hard drive prices in the past. I use one to backup the other and have it at 2.5TB full already (easy to do if your entire media collection is on it; I have 600+ movies in SD and HD, 6000+ songs, 5500+ high resolution photos and dozens of TV shows). I would have purchased 6TB drives if they had been available. I'll have to eventually buy another set of 3TB drives or use an array.
I knew somebody was going to say this... 3 TB drives was referring to 3 THUNDERBOLT drives, not a 3TB drive. The added benefit of TB is really going to be seen by SSD RAID drives, which are going to be very costly.


Leave it to fanboys to tell logical people how annoying they are. Guess what guy? The feeling is probably mutual. :cool:
cool, was i talking to you?
 
In the meantime.... I still want to know what you are doing that 1 monitor needs more than 10Gbps?

Display Port 1.2 also supports Daisy Chaining. It's also pure speculation that you can use 2 different channels for 2 monitors (since the monitors aren't TB aware for the most part) and it's also a reach to say you can reverse your channels and use 4 of them as downstream channels for 40 Gbps. That's all speculation and blind faith.

Again, I'm not dissing TB. I'm saying there's issue with Apple's choice of port to implement it. You keep this discussion going with your hypothetical scenarios in order to make it seem Apple is perfect.
 
Display Port 1.2 also supports Daisy Chaining. It's also pure speculation that you can use 2 different channels for 2 monitors (since the monitors aren't TB aware for the most part) and it's also a reach to say you can reverse your channels and use 4 of them as downstream channels for 40 Gbps. That's all speculation and blind faith.

Again, I'm not dissing TB. I'm saying there's issue with Apple's choice of port to implement it. You keep this discussion going with your hypothetical scenarios in order to make it seem Apple is perfect.

I know that, I still want to know what you need more than 10Gbps for ONE monitor. You will get your 20Gbps with any combo above 2 monitors that is theoretically possible, so again I ask, what do you need more than 10Gbps for ONE monitor for?

and i said that's why i'm looking into IF it is possible, i never said that you could, i said IF

I'm not saying apple is perfect you are complaining about data and video on the same cable, i'm telling you it's not an issue
 
I know that, I still want to know what you need more than 10Gbps for ONE monitor. You will get your 20Gbps with any combo above 2 monitors that is theoretically possible, so again I ask, what do you need more than 10Gbps for ONE monitor for?

Maybe I need 3 monitors to share the 21 Gbps. ;)
 
In the meantime.... I still want to know what you are doing that 1 monitor needs more than 10Gbps?
Not now but in few years:
So lets go forward 3 generations of display tech advancements.
Lets say that HDR becomes so mainstream that we start to use 16 bit colors.
And lets assume 3D is very common.
And ACD's new version is once again little bigger from 2560x1440 to real "4k" aka 4096x2160.
For stereographic 60Hz 4k HDR picture you need:
4096 * 2160 * 16 * 3 * 60 * 2= 50,960,793,600 bit/s = 51 Gbit/s!
 
Not now but in few years:
and you don't think that in a few years that thunderbolt tech can't increase? It's supposed to be able to do 100Gbps when switched to Optical..... your argument is meaningless.

And also, in the tech demo from intel they were running a 4k ACD plugged into a lacie lbd array running 4 1080p streams simultaneously, so i'm not thinking your problem is valid at all.
 
Last edited:
What the rumor suggests is that that USB3 port is actually a hybrid USB3.0/Thunderbolt port. Just like those eSATA/USB2 you find in some PCs.

An additional dock comes with that computer that provides all sort of crazy stuff including a discrete video IN the dock. Without the dock, the VAIO is suppose to be a crazy portable unit that last up to 16hrs on a single charge and leaving all the expansion and power-consuming (including a BD burner, GPU... etc) on the dock that connects to the laptop via Thunderbolt.

And even though I'm a 2011 MBP owner, I'd say Sony's approach makes much better sense. If they actually pull it off, I would see other major manufacturers follow suit. And if that's the case, stevie, just make a dongle for us early adopters and let's move on.

Holy cow. That laptop sounds really cool.
 
Maybe I need 3 monitors to share the 21 Gbps. ;)
Then you are screwed regardless because I'm pretty sure apple states that the GPU's only have 2 display outputs... until apple puts in better gpu's your point is moot.

thunderbolt removes the limitations, hardware is what is keeping you from running 4 and 5 monitor setups, NOT the cable.
 
Hmmm,
if you look at the picture in Wikipedia, it has arrows both ways also for dp.
Picture's source is told to be intel's pdf, which at least now, does not have this picture. Pretty secret stuff...
Also Wikipedia tells that intel only makse controllers with 1 or 2 ports.
So if your computer has more than 2 usb ports, they all can't be simultaneous TB ports, if computer ha only 1 TB controller.
 
Then you are screwed regardless because I'm pretty sure apple states that the GPU's only have 2 display outputs... until apple puts in better gpu's your point is moot.

thunderbolt removes the limitations, hardware is what is keeping you from running 4 and 5 monitor setups, NOT the cable.

Yes. Hardware is limiting: thunderbolt, not the graphics chips.

The discrete graphics in MBPs support 4 or 6 displays. In iMacs, they all support 6.

Maybe the AMD chips are limited to 3 monitors per port.

In the worst case, the current MBPs could support 2+1 or 3+1 displays (1 is the built-in).
 
Yes. Hardware is limiting: thunderbolt, not the graphics chips.

The discrete graphics in MBPs support 4 or 6 displays. In iMacs, they all support 6.

Maybe the AMD chips are limited to 3 monitors per port.

In the worst case, the current MBPs could support 2+1 or 3+1 displays (1 is the built-in).
except to do that they would have to support DP 1.2, which they probably don't do because the 13" HD3000 can't support it. Also, there are hardly any monitors that will support DP 1.2 at this time, and since WRX was bitching about upgrading his monitor anyways, that doesn't sound like an option.
 
and you don't think that in a few years that thunderbolt tech can't increase? It's supposed to be able to do 100Gbps when switched to Optical..... your argument is meaningless.

And also, in the tech demo from intel they were running a 4k ACD plugged into a lacie lbd array running 4 1080p streams simultaneously, so i'm not thinking your problem is valid at all.
"4k ACD", what's that?
Link for that?
If math is hard for you, maybe you didn't understand that's not about resolution.
Bandwidth need is about resolution AND 2D/3D AND refresh rate AND color depth.
Can you tell the specs of that display in that demo?

Oh, and you also forgot that last sentence from my original post:
"Of course if you keep re-buying your whole it department every year, this matters you nothing."

If you buy a mac today and new screen in 2013, how is your mac's TB upgraded in that instant?
 
except to do that they would have to support DP 1.2, which they probably don't do because the 13" HD3000 can't support it. Also, there are hardly any monitors that will support DP 1.2 at this time, and since WRX was bitching about upgrading his monitor anyways, that doesn't sound like an option.

You can use hubs with DisplayPort 1.2. The monitors do not need to daisy chain.

And a computer should not be obsolete for future upgrades from the get go, when it was easy to avoid it.
 
"4k ACD", what's that?
Link for that?
If math is hard for you, maybe you didn't understand that's not about resolution.
Bandwidth need is about resolution AND 2D/3D AND refresh rate AND color depth.
Can you tell the specs of that display in that demo?

Oh, and you also forgot that last sentence from my original post:
"Of course if you keep re-buying your whole it department every year, this matters you nothing."

If you buy a mac today and new screen in 2013, how is your mac's TB upgraded in that instant?
I will dig up the link for you

I understand that it's about all of that together to determine bandwidth, but who has a DP 1.2 4k 3d monitor? Yeah that's what i thought, and since the current mbp doesn't even support dp1.2 you would not even be able to hook it up

you need dp1.2 on both ends (comp and monitor.)
 
iMac used to have dp-in, so you could use iMac as external screen eg. mac mini.
I remember seeing that. I was interested in how it worked, didn't you have to boot the mac in a special mode to access that feature?
Then you are screwed regardless because I'm pretty sure apple states that the GPU's only have 2 display outputs... until apple puts in better gpu's your point is moot.

thunderbolt removes the limitations, hardware is what is keeping you from running 4 and 5 monitor setups, NOT the cable.

That isn't a fault of the GPU, that is Apples fault. eyefinity (AMD) is a 3+ display tech. With the top end cards able to drive 6 displays. The use of DP1.1 is what is keeping us from running more than one monitor at this point (per DP plug). Notice how only the 27" iMac can run two additional monitors, because it has two ports. What I think people may not realize is that per Thunderbolt controller you can only have two mDPs. So if Apple wanted to enable the 6 monitor eyefinity support for the top end GPU they would have to include 3 Thunderbolt controllers (per Intels graphic) because they don't support more than 2 DP connections per controller.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.