Going to be great for Time Machine back ups! Transferring HD videos is like nothing at all now. Sweets! Nice job Apple and Intel!
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Notes of Interest on Thunderbolt and MacBook Pro
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At some point they will eliminate the good thunderbolt port from the lower end mode (ie when the really fast optical stuff comes out)
Why? What is the difference between TB and when there was just one physical DP socket on the laptop? They can sit downstream from the same switch between the two outputs used when it was just a plain jane DP socket. The input pins for DP signal on the TB controllers are effectively as some pins on the old DP physical port.
the only difference now is that the DP singal is recoded ( or not if there is only a DP device on the line) and pushed onto the line. That's downstream from the video switching solution. ( i.e., would work with the Nvidia Optimus also since downstream. )
I think he may be mistaken. Intel's page, http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm, show's Gb/s, not GB/s.
Someone builds a dongle with two TB ports and one eSATA port. They put a SATA-to-PCI-e controller inside along with a TB controller. You not likely to get a powered variant of eSATA so will have to plug the drive in. May or May not need to pug in the dongle.
The dongle will probably be almost as expensive as enclosure that does the same thing for a single drive.
Sounds like marketing speak to me.
Just like Apple "can't" rewrite gpu drivers for my 09' mbp so that I could change gpu on the fly.
When pc's can hook up gpu's with SLI through PCIe, I just can't think why not to do this with TB.
Take PCIe v3 16 lane slot and you've got 128 Gbit/s bandwidth to spend.
Lots of room for multiple TB's & dp's.
Also PCIe v2 4 lane (16 Gbit/s) is good enough for one TB port.
But just like deconstruct60 points, the most economical place for TB add-on would be in graphics card. That way you wouldn't have to route dp signal through PCIe, only cpu->gpu & cpu->TB.
Anyway this TB v1 would need only about 2 lanes (PCIe v2) or 1 lane (PCIe v3).
So just like graphics cards have become audio cards because of hdmi, they might also start to be overall i/o-cards.
If Apple puts PCI-e v3.0 on the new Mac Pros and pays either Nvidia or AMD to come up with a graphics card with the Intel controller on it then it could happen. ( TB soaks up enough PCI-e bandwidth will need faster PCI-e lanes so that GPU and TB bandwidth don't step on each other. )
As previously said I don't think Nvidia nor AMD are going to be in a hurry to do that but if Apple pays for the R&D it is money they may not want to pass up. It is going to be hard though for them to spend their own R&D money so that Intel can take a larger share of the graphics revenue market.
Most of the Mobos with AMD CPU/chipsets are not made by AMD. Adding a TB controller is really no different than the SATA III and USB 3 controllers that were commonly added last year by mobo vendors. (minor difference in that need several PCI-e lanes and most PC boards are over extended on PCI-e lanes anyway. They already have switches and TB would be putting a switch on a switch. )
AMD isn't going to incorporate TB into their core chipsets. That's OK for a couple of years because Intel isn't either. Both them haven't finished weaving in USB 3.0 and just barely finished SATA III (which Intel paritally flubbed ) let alone the far less mature TB.
ATI (now AMD) and Nvidia never did FW800 because it wasn't ever widely adopted by peripherals. If there are enough external devices so that users commonly want to hook it up then it moves to core chipset. FW800 was, relateively speaking, used on a smaller subset of devices. In contrast at one point all video cameras had FW400. Now all the newer cameras have USB 2.0 ( and probably transitioning over time to USB 3.0). Apple itself blocked FW800 but limiting its distribution across all Macs for an extended period of time.
Sigh
From reading the technical documents it does appear that it's not practical or possible to make thunderbolt a retrofit for existing machines.
This explains it pretty well I think:
http://www.macworld.com/article/158145/2011/02/thunderbolt_what_you_need_to_know.html
I've needed this standard for years because I work with music with lots of track and sometimes HD video with it.
That being said, now you people without TB know how I felt with my G5 tower after the "We're switching to Intel" announcement.
It's not the end of the world but eventually you'll see this was the wise thing to do.
From reading the technical documents it does appear that it's not practical or possible to make thunderbolt a retrofit for existing machines.
This explains it pretty well I think:
http://www.macworld.com/article/158145/2011/02/thunderbolt_what_you_need_to_know.html
I've needed this standard for years because I work with music with lots of track and sometimes HD video with it.
That being said, now you people without TB know how I felt with my G5 tower after the "We're switching to Intel" announcement.
It's not the end of the world but eventually you'll see this was the wise thing to do.
Hmmm... Anandtech says differently. Perhaps this will spur adoption:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4194/intels-codename-lightpeak-launches-as-thunderbolt
The only thing that doesn't sound right to me is this whole deal that Apple will have the port before everyone else does for close to a year. Big deal. Really who is going to switch to a Mac because of a new port? I think the importance of this is over inflated. Hopefully TB will find wide adoption and cut down the number and size of ports.
time machine backup's are mostly limited due to two facts.
One: hardrive have a maximum sequential read/write cap (wouldn't be much more in the than 80 MB/s in the 5400 rpm 750 GB HDD).
Two: backing up is most of the time NOT SEQUENTIAL, so in real life you'll average at around 5-15 MB/s.
The time capsule itself even seems to cap at only 15 MB/s (read/write, not throughput/network connectivity).
TB/LP = 10Gb/s raw throughput ~ 900MB/s usable throughput
USB 3.0 = 5 Gb/s raw throughput ~ 150-200 MB/s usable throughput
GBase ethernet = 1 Gb/s raw throughput ~ 90-110 MB/s usable
Firewire 800 = 800 Mb/s raw throughput ~ 80-100 MB/s usable
Backing up will not go any faster using TB in comparison to quite a lot of more frequently used connections.
The power of TB is the extendability of your computer with PCI periferals, without the common high latencies, the scalability, the usage of external storage as a internal. Except for the multiple display you can now easily connect to your mac/pc using just one port I don't expect to see soon any consumer products that'll use TB as a necessity.
Most people who stay on top of technology knew this was coming and it was going to be a game changer. For those people complaining that it doesn't fit into current technology, well... you either knew that would happen when you bought your Mac pro's - and certainly, you realized that you would have to upgrade when it came out? You can't complain because something new and better comes out. As for everyone else, if you can't afford this, then you probably don't need it (yet). Most average users can get by just fine with existing technology, power users are going to embrace this even if it costs extra join. I look forward to the next Mac Pro's that have this built in... that is if I can afford to buy a new machine!
I think the discussion was about the Engadget reporter using MB/s in their video review.
You're right. My brain wasn't fully engaged in the discussion. Just looked up a conversion chart, and with the 10Gb/s number, you get max throughput near 1200 MB/s. Throw in overhead, and his statement was accurate. My mistake.
But think... if we did not move onto the equipment when we needed it, we would still being using Fat Crayons
Bummed about no compatibility for existing computers to use TB. My Mac Pro is only a few months old.
I am going to have to wait and see. The times have always proven to me that there's never really a limit in technology, just a lack of interest or desire or market need from the parties involved if you know what I mean. Since TB is using the PCIe x4 lane, and we already have plenty of bandwidth options as fast or faster than 10GBps in ethernet, FOE, and Fibre channel, there may not be much of a limitation on creating a TB card . . . . even if it only got us half of the proposed bandwidth.
True, but FCP is pulling from the source files on the Promise to create the composite image, and that image can be played back in full uncompressed 1080p. The engadget guy might not be smart enough to set the app for those settings, but it is stellar speed.
Not to mention, that it's pulling the four streams from the Promise, encoding in realtime on the MBP, spitting it back out on the canvas for FCP and the 27" ACD without any dropped frames.
TB is a nice step up from FW800 and in lots of ways eSATA since the bottleneck in many HD edit rigs was the I/O.
There is such a thing as a G-Technology TB drive? Link please
On the side, the sucky part about TB for current workstation owners is that they've spent $5000 for a decently equipped Mac Pro and are going to feel that lack of TB hurt down the line. Any company with the budget and the mind power WILL make a TB PCIe card for them, and most likely will charge whatever outrageous price they can.
If I were in that camp, and spend the paltry $5000 for a Mac Pro, I would definitely put another $800 or more in for a 2-6 port TB PCIe card.