Picture this: in the year 2015, the ONLY ports on most computers are USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. You no longer have a need for VGA, DVI, HDMI, FireWire, or even Ethernet. All of those could be run through Thunderbolt and suddenly it's much easier to connect devices to computers. Yes, it would certainly take a long time to adopt the technology like that, but it sounds like a convenient world once fully adopted, doesn't it?
Wishing the disappearance of legacy ports is pretty old fashioned. It will always take few decades more than estimated.
Dvi came in 13 years ago and everybody was shouting how vga will die at least when all screens are flat (=digital).
Fast forward 13 years and guess what is most common connector on laptop: VGA. Even when there's no analog displays anymore. Nobody with any knowledge in ITC would have predicted this a decade ago.
The actual "way things are" is changing. The new Intel chip has embedded support for Thunderbolt, so Windows computers will be able to have these ports without spending so much on Thunderbolt. The new chips will help on the price of the connectors, and market volume will lower the prices as well. Apple chose the right horse.
And Ivy Bridge also has support onboard for USB 3.0. Which can work on Thunderbolt along with the screen and solid state storage. And firwire 800 drives.
Once more and more Ivy Bridge is out there, the device manufacturers will start pumping out affordable things along with more expensive gee-whiz suff.
Imagine a computer in pieces, connected by some future Thunderbolt. The end of the tower. Completely configurable.
Also, complete baloney.
Ivy Bridge does not have tb integrated, maybe Haswell will next year.
Also IB does not have fw integrated like no chipset ever had.
Somehow Apple has always had discreet controllers for fw and tb, but always they have run out of space when they should have put usb3 controller (which has always also been smallest and cheapest) on mb.
Things are really changing, but Apple chose the wrong horse.
Things have changed in that so much money has been invested both in corporate world and in private world to existing devices and infrastructure, that today's connections won't just die away. Just like electricity sockets or light bulb sockets won't die away.
You know, there are still ps/2 sockets in mb's?
Industry has stopped trying to replace rj45 and instead are trying to figure out how to better use it.
Every year there is more stuff sold, which will add the legacy weight and therefore slows down "the new generation". This is why 3rd party manufacturers are not intrigued when just-one-more-port is invented. They won't use it (in large scale), if there's doubt, that most of they customers will need that for at least a decade. There won't be any revolutions in this area anymore, just slow evolution, where new things should be designed with sharp and broad vision to both past & the future.
As for tb, Apple hasn't played their cards well for the future. All tb stuff will remain expensive. The technology is just so much more complicated that it just can't get affordable without being sold to almost every computer user.
Usb3 will win this without any doubt. Very few will pay 10x for 2x speed, so tb will not became mainstream.
Tb is also getting old before it is even adopted.
It will not replace workstation for those who need bandwidth and for those who don't need, usb3 is enough.
People are already asking big retina displays. These will saturate current tb with no time. After that, you'll have faster connection to your storage via usb3 than tb.
If they want to keep dp integrated to tb, they need new version of tb, which will be even more expensive than the current one and also all current tb stuff will be obsolete. This is just dead end.
Maybe they'll just have keep tb in the backburner like fw and see if it will succeed after several years. Maybe they have learnt something from intel's mistake with rambus' rdram.
Consumers don't know what hd-sdi is, but it is a vital connection for big industry and that's how it should be. There no reason to market it to consumers as a new way to hook up displays and on the side make things more expensive.
I already wrote about the tower and saturation issue here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/15143816/
I don't know how widely this will ever be used. Firewire was originally intended for high speed data transmission, and USB for standard one-connector-for-most-things. We all know how that went. USB got faster and cheaper, and eve though firewire 800 was faster, USB 2 was the go-to connector.
Unless thunderbolt turns into a one-cable-to-rule-them all (and aside from power it looks like it will get there) it's not going to take off the way USB did. It needs to be cheaper and easier to use. Thunderbolt only has one of those points covered.
Light Peak was originally designed to be an extension for other sockets.
What we have now is because it was tried to change it to something else.
Maybe the problem really was, that intel's researchers first developed the interconnection and only after that started thinking what it could be used for.
Apple's biggest marketing blunder with Thunderbolt : making everyone think it was aimed at replacing USB. Whether intentional or not on their part, that is now what most in the Apple community think.
Thunderbolt is not a USB replacement. Never will be. It'll be a niche host based connectivity option for higher end machines and peripherals, mostly used in the prosumer world.
Enterprise is going network based connectivity (FC or IP SANs for storage, network based peripherals over GBE or 10GE), consumers are sticking with lower mass market priced peripherals (USB3).
Exactly!
And the problem will be, that it is sold to 100% of mac users, when only 1% really benefits from it. It should be handled more like express card; only those who need it, need to buy it.
My bet is, that tb will cause more problems with average mac user than regular dp would, after big retina displays arrive to market.
(Another gen of displays from Apple, that have certain limitations with very recent macs.)
Intel talked a big game about the optical transition being the chance for unification on the I/O front. They also used modified USB 3.0 connectors for most of their Light Peak demonstrations. I think they may have been hoping to go down the path of standardization, and possibly even have Light Peak rolled into the USB specification at some point. However, they had two eager customers that wanted the technology sooner rather than later and weren't concerned in the slightest about standards: Apple and Sony. Apple was willing to commit in a major way, but they also wanted an exclusive. There was no way to make that kind of deal with nearly a dozen players involved, so instead Apple and Intel cut everybody else out. Apple would bring their own trademark, Thunderbolt, and their own PHY based on the Mini DisplayPort connector which they had developed and thus held the license to. (Did anyone ever believe that Intel came up with the "Thunderbolt" moniker? If they had named it, they would have opted for something far more romantic, like "Intel CV82524EF/L Converged High-Speed Packet Based Controller (Formerly Light Ridge)".)
Not ones to miss an opportunity, Intel still sold their controllers to Sony, who used them in their Vaio Z notebooks and media dock via a "proprietary" optical implementation that was essentially identical to the Light Peak demonstration hardware. Through some careful couching of words by Sony and Intel, they could claim that this wasn't really Thunderbolt or USB 3.0, and therefore didn't infringe on any licensing agreements that might already be in place.
Now the issue that Apple faced was that they had an exclusive deal on a super fast controller that was only designed to push a signal down about 2 inches of copper. Repurposing the pins on the mDP connector and locating it close enough to the controller wasn't too hard, but the only way to propagate that signal down any reasonable length of cable required additional circuitry. With only six months to solve this problem, Apple adapted some more or less off-the-shelf components from the telecom industry and created the active Thunderbolt cable. This was probably the only solution that would also allow for backwards and forwards compatibility with future controllers or different media.
At some point down the road, Intel may well make the Thunderbolt PHY much more integrated and robust. But for now, using a tiny, consumer oriented, friction fit, 20-pin connector for 2 channels of bidirectional, 10.3125 Gbps signaling is going to require active cabling. The good news is that multiple vendors are developing silicon specifically targeting this problem, and thus prices should indeed come down—which was the topic of the original article. In addition to Intersil, I also noticed that TI seems to have a whole range of Thunderbolt products ready for market:
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/tps2...?DCMP=hpa_int_thunderbolt&HQS=thunderbolt-bt1
Apple chose the technically wrong way by coupling dp to tb, which resulted in hindered dp and now they will face the bandwidth problem.
Sony chose technically right way by keeping dp free of additional standard versions, but failed to negotiate with usb consortium.
All 4 (intel, apple, sony, usb consortium) failed in creating one solution that all would use and because of volume would become reasonably priced.
I just can't see that in current market situation more chips would make tb devices much cheaper. Volumes are simply too small, that it wouldn't matter if the chips would be free.
I guess money wasn't in mind for those who designed tb. To break the bad usability of chain topology, you need hubs. Eg. 4 port hub would need 4 controllers? In a situation where many tb devices have no second port for daisy-chaining, because those ports are just too expensive?
So if adding more lanes to the cable isn't desirable, and the highest performance silicon in production is only 36% faster than the original Thunderbolt implementation, well that's not really enough to provide what could be considered a generational advance. That will only happen when single lane throughput of 25 Gbps can be achieved. The race to this milestone was previously being contested by Mellanox and Qlogic, until January of this year when, lo and behold, Intel acquired Qlogic's InfiniBand business. Thus the next speed bump to Thunderbolt will presumably follow the EDR InfiniBand rollout, most likely sometime in 2014. Maybe then fake optical cables will become standard.
Does it really matter moneywise where the media conversion is made in chain-topology? Every connection needs 2 ports, 1 cable and 2 media conversions?
After all, back to the topic, if price of a cable is just a few percent of using the tb ecosystem, what does it matter if the cable is cheaper? Lowering the whole bill for 1%? Or even 2%.
Goosh, I'll need to run buy new mac with horrible glossy screen to get part of this amazing cost savings!
