Magma Introduces Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion Box

[RMarch]

GB=Gigabyte Gb=Gigabit
Video takes an enormous amount of bandwidth uncompressed HD (1920x1080) is roughly 5.0 Gb's. Internal PCIe cards are around 100gb's. So thunderbolt is a bit slow, for this application. Great for other things though.

You are off by a factor of 100. High end AVCHD 1920X1080 tops out around 25 Mb/s NOT Gb/s!!! Thunderbolt in its current configuration can support bi directional 20Gb/s (2 bi-directional channels of 10Gb/s). In reality, your example of video does not equate to graphics acceleration anyway, but the point is moot. You can easily run high end graphics acceleration over Thunderbolt.

In fact, this is not speculative. Sony is currently doing it with their new Vaio Z. Although the expansion port is not branded as Thunderbolt, it is the Intel light peak technology (feel free to read up on the soap opera about what happened to Sony to get stuck in the position of not supporting the right connector to be called Thunderbolt.

 

[MattInOz]

That would be rather difficult.... for one thing, it only supplies 10W max, right..? So you'd need an external power supply for the PCIe card.. kinda messy. Also... you're only getting what, 2.5 GBps tops? Not much faster than AGP 8x, which while at the time offered loads of overhead, at this point in time would present itself as something of a bottleneck... and interface bottlenecks are kind of awful.

I'm waiting for a decent Monitor maker to introduce a thunderbolt monitor with a PCIe slot inside.

After all it's going to need to be powered and be connected to the TB port anyway.

 

[TMar]

He said 2.5GB/s. Which is 20Gbps. Which is 10Gbps bidirectional. Which is correct.
Multiple channels would greatly improve the usefulness of this device

He said 2.5GB/s tops, which is incorrect.

that enclosure does not support providing additional power to high-end graphics cards from what i read.

That enclosure, not every enclosure.

GB=Gigabyte Gb=Gigabit
Video takes an enormous amount of bandwidth uncompressed HD (1920x1080) is roughly 5.0 Gb's. Internal PCIe cards are around 100gb's. So thunderbolt is a bit slow, for this application. Great for other things though.

What? HD video at 640 MBps? Um, no. Internal PCI-e cards are 100gb's? A pci-e x16 slot is 8GB/s. Thunderbolt is just an interconnect it allows pci-e and display port over a cable.

 

[mosx]

No reason to use Thunderbolt for external GPUs in its current form.

PCIe 2.x x16 offers roughly 3.2x the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. PCIe 3.x x16 will effectively double that. And PCIe 3.0 is already being rolled out.

An external GPU might be better than the Intel junk built-in. But with all of that bandwidth gone, all you're going to get is better image quality. Not better frame-rates. Theres also no power for GPUs. Where are the extra connectors? It can't handle the wattage most high end GPUs require. Look at the case too. No airflow for a good high end GPU. Not even good enough for a low-end passively cooled one.

Might be good for other devices, such as cards to add USB 3.0 and such. But no reason to even consider it for a GPU.

 

[TMar]

No reason to use Thunderbolt for external GPUs in its current form.

PCIe 2.x x16 offers roughly 3.2x the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. PCIe 3.x x16 will effectively double that. And PCIe 3.0 is already being rolled out.

An external GPU might be better than the Intel junk built-in. But with all of that bandwidth gone, all you're going to get is better image quality. Not better frame-rates. Theres also no power for GPUs. Where are the extra connectors? It can't handle the wattage most high end GPUs require. Look at the case too. No airflow for a good high end GPU. Not even good enough for a low-end passively cooled one.

Might be good for other devices, such as cards to add USB 3.0 and such. But no reason to even consider it for a GPU.

Again, wrong. TB IS pci-e over a cable, it isn't 3.2x faster.

 

[mrwonkers]

Woop dee doo poo, I rather a TB hard drive enclosure or a TB to USB 3 adapter about now. HURRY UP!

 

[mosx]

Again, wrong. TB IS pci-e over a cable, it isn't 3.2x faster.

Wrong again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

PCIe offers varying levels of bandwidth. The most commonly used for GPUs is PCIe 2.0 x16, which offers 8GB/sec of bandwidth compared to Thunderbolt's 2.5. PCIe 3.0 x16 will offer 16GB/sec of bandwidth. PCIe 3.0 is being rolled out on motherboards as we speak.

Being "PCIe over a cable" does NOT mean it can support the bandwidth of all variations of PCIe.

 

[RobQuads]

While its great another thunderbold product has been announced when will one of them realise there is a huge market for just the simple adapters instead of these things which are such a small market in comparison.

 

[Gamoe]

While its great another thunderbold product has been announced when will one of them realise there is a huge market for just the simple adapters instead of these things which are such a small market in comparison.

Agreed. I'm still waiting for an eSATA adapter with multiplier support. It would really open up storage options for my iMac.

 

[Buildbright]

Wrong again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

PCIe offers varying levels of bandwidth. The most commonly used for GPUs is PCIe 2.0 x16, which offers 8GB/sec of bandwidth compared to Thunderbolt's 2.5. PCIe 3.0 x16 will offer 16GB/sec of bandwidth. PCIe 3.0 is being rolled out on motherboards as we speak.

Being "PCIe over a cable" does NOT mean it can support the bandwidth of all variations of PCIe.

Hate to burst your bubble but people are using external gpu's with laptops over slower connections (PCIe 1.0) work with solutions like the vidock and there are YouTube videos to prove it. My company is working on a affordable thunderbolt solution right now. Like most we are held up by the lack of intel tb chips. With PCIe 1.0 you won't really benefit any card above an amd 5770 or GTX 460 but with thunderbolt we expect to increase that to a 6870 or 570.

 

[AAPLaday]

Hate to burst your bubble but people are using external gpu's with laptops over slower connections (PCIe 1.0) work with solutions like the vidock and there are YouTube videos to prove it. My company is working on a affordable thunderbolt solution right now. Like most we are held up by the lack of intel tb chips. With PCIe 1.0 you won't really benefit any card above an amd 5770 or GTX 460 but with thunderbolt we expect to increase that to a 6870 or 570.

If you guys can get a 6870 or 570 working then that would be immense. Any timeframe or more news on this development?

 

[KnightWRX]

You are off by a factor of 100. High end AVCHD 1920X1080 tops out around 25 Mb/s NOT Gb/s!!!

That's compressed. 1920x1080 using 24 bits of color information and streaming at 60 frames per second (60 hz refresh on your monitor) requires 373248000 bytes of data per second or close to 2985984000 bits/sec. 2.98 Gbps.

Of course, that's not required on your PCIe bus, you're not building the frame buffer in system memory and copying it to the card. You're building it on the card, hence you're not going to send 60 times the same graphic over the bus per second.

 

[darkplanets]

Glad to see things are finally moving along. It reminds me of a friend's old POS laptop that had a PCIe slot on his outer shell... it made something pretty crappy into something tolerable.

 

[MagnumOP]

It doesn't matter that it only has one TB port. Just put it at the end of the daisy chain.

I was looking at the Sonnet Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter, being sold by OWC, and noticed something....

This adapter only has one thunderbolt port, which means on the 21.5" iMac, macbook air, & Mac Mini (or any future mac with only one thunderbolt port) you can't daisy chain an external monitor/display port HDMI adapter.

I thought that having two ports would be mandatory in the spec, to allow legacy display port monitors, but I guess not. That could cripple some of these new thunderbolt products, at least on everything except the 27" iMac, until a thunderbolt hub, or other solution comes out.

As I have my iMac hooked into an external tv, anything peripheral that requires itself to be at the end of a chain is very limiting. I wonder if a cheap HDMI adapter with a thunderbolt pass thru will be available in the future....

Edit: I read about the daisy chaining, so it looks like the Magma Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion Box will be ok, as I assume it has two thunderbolt ports, but it will have to be a consideration when looking at all future thunderbolt devices.

 

[Prodo123]

He said 2.5GB/s tops, which is incorrect.

How is it wrong? Thunderbolt has maximum throughput of 10Gbps bidirectional, which is 2.5GB/s overall.

 

[mosx]

Hate to burst your bubble but people are using external gpu's with laptops over slower connections (PCIe 1.0) work with solutions like the vidock and there are YouTube videos to prove it. My company is working on a affordable thunderbolt solution right now. Like most we are held up by the lack of intel tb chips. With PCIe 1.0 you won't really benefit any card above an amd 5770 or GTX 460 but with thunderbolt we expect to increase that to a 6870 or 570.

You're not bursting anyones bubble. I never said it wouldn't work. I just said it would be stupid to do.

Again, Thunderbolt in its current form only has a little under 1/3 of the bandwidth PCIe 2.0 x16 offers. Whats the point of using a GTX 460 when 2/3 of the expected bandwidth is just not there? All you're going to be able to do is ramp up anti-aliasing and other filtering to insane levels. The low-end CPUs Apple uses can't keep up with a GTX 460 to begin with. Thunderbolt will just slow things down even more.

People who seem to think games will run good with a Thunderbolt connected GPU don't seem to understand how games actually work. That PCIe 2.0 x16 bus is extremely important. The CPU plays an extremely crucial role and that bandwidth is needed for the CPU to feed the GPU what it needs to get the job done. And, contrary to popular belief, the GPU still needs that bus to swap things in and out of main system memory and video memory and off the HDD.

People who seem to think games will run good with a Thunderbolt connected GPU seem to be the same ones who think that current Macs with dedicated GPUs run games "good" and that games are "playable" on Intel's current GPUs. I wouldn't call non-native resolution with sub-30 frames frame-rates and detail levels lower than the current consoles "good", but if you have such low standards to begin with, maybe kicking up the details and resolution with no increase in frame-rate and the possibility of some severe stuttering could be an improvement. But considering what this type of solution will cost, it'd be better to just get a dedicated Windows PC for gaming to start with. Even a 6 year old Xbox 360 would be a better solution than some silly external GPU. That seems more like a "See!? I told you it could be done!" sort of thing than something to be taken seriously.

 

[iamkarlp]

I can, at this moment, point you to a number of shipping TB devices.

Everyone is still being held up by the Intel TB port issue, but that will be fixed soon enough.

The pegasus is shipping, the blackmagic HDSDI interface is shipping, the SanLink is shipping (although admittedly, it just started).

I understand that this doesn't excite many of you, but it's a lifesaver for us.

We have never before had the ability to use AIO's and notebooks on fiber channel networks, with >100MB/s storage systems, or work with broadcast style video, all huge day-to-day activities. And the prices are very reasonable for our market.

In time, once the chips are in supply and common, we will start seeing docking stations, port adapters, and other more consumer oriented products. At the moment however it's being used in upmarket applications as it helps pay the R&D and help them work out supply/production issues,

I'm honestly surprised the pricing is as good as it is this early in the game. It points to Thunderbolt peripherals standing a very good chance of being affordable in the near future.

Karl P

or even shipping!

I'm getting tired of all these articles on non-shipping thunderbolt products.

 

[gnasher729]

People who seem to think games will run good with a Thunderbolt connected GPU don't seem to understand how games actually work. That PCIe 2.0 x16 bus is extremely important. The CPU plays an extremely crucial role and that bandwidth is needed for the CPU to feed the GPU what it needs to get the job done. And, contrary to popular belief, the GPU still needs that bus to swap things in and out of main system memory and video memory and off the HDD.

From all that I know the full PCIe speed is just for bragging rights and isn't of much importance in practice. Thunderbolt can send textures to the card 20 times faster than you can load them from the hard drive. There have been plenty of tests where testers ran a card with PCIe 16, 8 and 4 lanes, with very little performance difference.

I can, at this moment, point you to a number of shipping TB devices.

Hitachi just announced an 8 TB TB HD (eight terabyte Thunderbolt hard drive). Quite useful for the video market where the cost of SSD would be totally excessive.

 

[SoftDel]

Just a quick thought,

while all this talk about external graphics cards is awesome, aren't drivers going to be needed just to get the card working.

I'm assuming if I plugged my 580 into my mac, (ignoring the issue of bandwidth) that it won't work at all because apple or nvidia haven't got round to providing any drivers?

 

[KnightWRX]

Hitachi just announced an 8 TB TB HD (eight terabyte Thunderbolt hard drive). Quite useful for the video market where the cost of SSD would be totally excessive.

I don't get why you associate a 8 TB thunderbolt device to a SSD.

 

[TMar]

Wrong again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

PCIe offers varying levels of bandwidth. The most commonly used for GPUs is PCIe 2.0 x16, which offers 8GB/sec of bandwidth compared to Thunderbolt's 2.5. PCIe 3.0 x16 will offer 16GB/sec of bandwidth. PCIe 3.0 is being rolled out on motherboards as we speak.

Being "PCIe over a cable" does NOT mean it can support the bandwidth of all variations of PCIe.

OK, let me slow this down for you, PCIe 2.0 16 x is 8GB/s while thunderbolt is 2.5GB/s per channel. That's what you're ignoring that a device can use more than one channel so it could run at 20GB/s. Since you were the one talking GPU's, no modern GPU (single GPU card for sure) even saturates a PCIe 8x slots bandwidth. This has been tested again and again, that's why there is not hit when running SLI/Crossfire on boards that don't have the lanes to run 16x/16x and force you to drop to 8x/8x.

You're not bursting anyones bubble. I never said it wouldn't work. I just said it would be stupid to do.

Again, Thunderbolt in its current form only has a little under 1/3 of the bandwidth PCIe 2.0 x16 offers. Whats the point of using a GTX 460 when 2/3 of the expected bandwidth is just not there? All you're going to be able to do is ramp up anti-aliasing and other filtering to insane levels. The low-end CPUs Apple uses can't keep up with a GTX 460 to begin with. Thunderbolt will just slow things down even more.

People who seem to think games will run good with a Thunderbolt connected GPU don't seem to understand how games actually work. That PCIe 2.0 x16 bus is extremely important. The CPU plays an extremely crucial role and that bandwidth is needed for the CPU to feed the GPU what it needs to get the job done. And, contrary to popular belief, the GPU still needs that bus to swap things in and out of main system memory and video memory and off the HDD.

People who seem to think games will run good with a Thunderbolt connected GPU seem to be the same ones who think that current Macs with dedicated GPUs run games "good" and that games are "playable" on Intel's current GPUs. I wouldn't call non-native resolution with sub-30 frames frame-rates and detail levels lower than the current consoles "good", but if you have such low standards to begin with, maybe kicking up the details and resolution with no increase in frame-rate and the possibility of some severe stuttering could be an improvement. But considering what this type of solution will cost, it'd be better to just get a dedicated Windows PC for gaming to start with. Even a 6 year old Xbox 360 would be a better solution than some silly external GPU. That seems more like a "See!? I told you it could be done!" sort of thing than something to be taken seriously.

I think you're the one that doesn't understand how games actually work. A 460 definitively doesn't saturate a PCIe 8x slot.

How is it wrong? Thunderbolt has maximum throughput of 10Gbps bidirectional, which is 2.5GB/s overall.

And it would be correct if there was only one channel but there isn't.

 

[kolax]

That's what you're ignoring that a device can use more than one channel so it could run at 20GB/s.

Where are we told that Thunderbolt can run at 20GB/s?!

 

[KnightWRX]

And it would be correct if there was only one channel but there isn't.

2 channels per port means that it's 20 Gbps maximum in 1 direction (downstream or upstream). 20 Gbps gives about 2.5 GB/s, so it is very correct.

Remember, a channel being bi-directional doesn't mean you can use part of the upstream bandwidth for downstream. It just means upstream and downstream have dedicated bandwidth.

 

[Eidorian]

The CPU plays an extremely crucial role and that bandwidth is needed for the CPU to feed the GPU what it needs to get the job done. And, contrary to popular belief, the GPU still needs that bus to swap things in and out of main system memory and video memory and off the HDD.

The GTX 560M compares to the GTX 550 Ti on the desktop side. My point still stands.

 

[TMar]

2 channels per port means that it's 20 Gbps maximum in 1 direction (downstream or upstream). 20 Gbps gives about 2.5 GB/s, so it is very correct.

Remember, a channel being bi-directional doesn't mean you can use part of the upstream bandwidth for downstream. It just means upstream and downstream have dedicated bandwidth.

Only Macs as of this moment have 2 channel ports. That wasn't part of Intel's spec they said either 4 or 8 and Apple muscled their way into only having 2. Didn't know we were limiting the Thunderbolt's interconnect as a whole into only Apple cheap implementation of it.