Very true. Now how does that benefit the end user? How does it make the Thunderbolt controller faster? The per channel speed stays the same, but now we can fit more channels down a single pipe.
When optical TB becomes more prevalent, they'll probably move the hardware back into the port controller. Then there will be cheaper cables, but it will establish a fragmented legacy cable market. Perhaps we might also see a transducer dongle adapter.
All this putting chips in cables does sound perverse, but we live in an age where things have become so small and so cheap there's really no reason not to put intelligence inside the most mundane things.
Yeah I guess Thunderbolt will be perfect once it goes optical Until then it's just a limited solution, and until then I would say it's not that much better than USB 3.0, for most uses, when considering the price.
And I was surprised to find chips in ink cartridges that keep track of ink levels without having a clue about actual ink levels Another way to make people pay more!
Optical is not any more perfect than copper. There is no benefit at short distances.
Ever heard of "teaming", as in "Ethernet teaming"?
PCIe packets can be transmitted in parallel on multiple channels, multiplying bandwith for the end user - so the "per channel" speed for the extended PCIe bus can be the sum of the actual fibre channels used.
For example, instead of only PCIe x4, WDM with 4 channels at the current data rate would allow PCIe x16 devices to be supported!
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But, enough of this tangent - T-Bolt 1.0 will never go faster than it is now, regardless of whether copper or hybrid Cu-optical cables are used.
We'll have to wait for T-Bolt V2.0 (or "PCI Express External") for faster external connections.
Sure there is, no cross-talk or interference by electrical and magnetic fields, resulting in higher throughput due to less error correction being required. On the other hand, careful how you bend that wire.
Yeah I guess Thunderbolt will be perfect once it goes optical… Until then it's just a limited solution, and until then I would say it's not that much better than USB 3.0, for most uses, when considering the price.
And I was surprised to find chips in ink cartridges that keep track of ink levels without having a clue about actual ink levels… Another way to make people pay more!
Sure there is, no cross-talk or interference by electrical and magnetic fields, resulting in higher throughput due to less error correction being required. On the other hand, careful how you bend that wire.
Do you worry about cross-talk or interference on your USB cables?
Do you worry about cross-talk or interference on your GbE cables?
Do you worry about cross-talk or interference on your 1394 cables?
Do you worry about cross-talk or interference on your eSATA cables?
Since I use all of these, and the answer is "NO" for all, why shouldn't I conclude that this is one more piece of evidence that T-Bolt is a half-baked concept, rolled out before reasonable real-world testing?
If cross-talk and interference are issues for T-Bolt 1.0 - then T-Bolt 1.0 has serious flaws. We should look forward to PCIe Express External to kill T-Bolt outright.
Do you worry about cross-talk or interference on your GbE cables?
If they want to keep dp coupled with tb, there is a problem and something has to be done. Current tb does not have enough bandwidth for future retina displays. Combined with Apple's obsession for insanely limited amount of simultaneous models, I can't believe that they would sell both non-retina (for people who want to use multiple external displays with one computer) and retina (for people who want to use only one external display with one computer) model at the same time.I am familiar with teaming, but as I said, introducing higher orders of parallelism to Thunderbolt doesn't bring anything desirable to the table. The first generation of Thunderbolt controllers included 2-channel and 4-channel designs ranging in price from roughly $20-$30. The 2nd generation brought us a single-channel controller and the first Thunderbolt accessory to retail for under $30. Everyone is clamoring for cheaper Thunderbolt gear. Adding more lanes to a serial interface tends to scale up the costs associated with it in a fairly linear fashion. I don't see a lot of forum posts where people are saying, "Heck, I'd happily pay twice as much for Thunderbolt if only it had more bandwidth, but 10 Gbps x2 just won't cut it for my workflow."
I'd guess that doubling the channel speed is just too difficult eg. too expensive. Then the only option is more channels.The per channel speed stays the same, but now we can fit more channels down a single pipe. What does that do to the complexity of the cross-bar switch in the controller? Say we go for a 5x increase in bandwidth, now your switch has gone from 8 ports to 24. How do we feed that from the back end? Add more protocol adapters, bump the DP adapters to DisplayPort 1.2 and increase the PCIe connection to PCIe 3.0 x16. Oops, now we need a 40-port Thunderbolt switch and a 32-lane PCIe 3.0 switch. We've got a massive, expensive, power hungry, 800-pin behemoth of a controller on our hands. Sounds perfect for a mobile device. Now everyone can pay an extra $480 for anything that includes a Thunderbolt port, and we still need to retain the copper in the connector to provide bus power and not break compatibility with DisplayPort/Thunderbolt 1.0.
The silicon is the limiting factor, not the medium. There is no "true" optical cable that can make the silicon driving it any faster, and simply increasing the parallelism of the system at this point doesn't make any sense.
If they want to keep dp coupled with tb, there is a problem and something has to be done. Current tb does not have enough bandwidth for future retina displays. Combined with Apple's obsession for insanely limited amount of simultaneous models, I can't believe that they would sell both non-retina (for people who want to use multiple external displays with one computer) and retina (for people who want to use only one external display with one computer) model at the same time.
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Then, the final option: go back to drawing table and think again what light peak was designed for and making the logical decision: separating dp and tb again.
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Optical is not any more perfect than copper. There is no benefit at short distances.
When a piece of cable is cut from a spool...
[snip]
...So, it's technically possible to put calibration equipment onto the device and then use cheap cables between devices. But I don't think you really want that to happen.![]()
PC manufacters have been very slow to adopt, however perhaps it will gain traction. Although it's superior I can see it taking FireWires place as 2nd to USB3.
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.
I own over a thousand dollars worth of TB peripherals.
Sure there is, no cross-talk or interference by electrical and magnetic fields, resulting in higher throughput due to less error correction being required. On the other hand, careful how you bend that wire.
Yeah but I'm speaking about the technical aspect: it's just a transparent plastic wire, and nothing more, while the electric version today is not simply a cable but two microcomputers and eight or so wires. It's far more complex, thus prone to failure and higher prices.
Optical should be far simpler, and shouldn't require a pair of microcomputers in each freaking cable. Therefore I suspect that optical should be many times cheaper, even though it isn't going to be for pointless marketing reasons.
In theory. In practice, it doesn't really affect anything.
You've never dealt with a shoddy Cat5e installation before it seems.
I've also dealt with fiber optics squeezed between floor tiles and bent at 90 degrees (good thing the SAN is multipathed).
Everybody's expecting that the new display is retina. They already did with iphone, ipad and mbp. Non-retina would be disappointment like last mp "update" was. (Funny that in new MSI's mb, there's next vga port next to tb port quite happily and at the same time Apple can't put tb to MP even if it kills as many legacy ports as possible on all its products...Although you do say "future retina displays", it is worth noting that the MBPR's 2880x1800 screen is pretty much the highest resolution you can still drive via DP 1.1a. That means that a single Thunderbolt port can still drive two external displays at that resolution. Since the internal panels on the iMacs would be driven by DP 1.2 directly from the GPU, they can go "retina" if Apple so chooses. And I don't think too many people would be disappointed to see a not-necessarily-retina, 30-inch, 2880x1800, Apple Thunderbolt Display with USB 3.0 ports...
If I remember correctly, intel wanted to include light peak to usb socket, but usb consortium didn't approve their intentions.Many of the early Light Peak demonstrations involved transporting uncompressed HD display data at the same time as other data. I don't believe DP was a last minute addition in any way. If anything, I think Intel considered including an even wider array of protocol adapters within the controllers.
The problem isn't the degrees, it's the radius.
If I remember correctly, intel wanted to include light peak to usb socket, but usb consortium didn't approve their intentions.
First mistake - running GbE on Cat5e instead of Cat6.
You've never dealt with a shoddy Cat5e installation before it seems. Of course, I've also dealt with fiber optics squeezed between floor tiles and bent at 90 degrees (good thing the SAN is multipathed).
How much the cost of the one and only tb cable in the market has declined in past 2 years?As we all know, it has taken quite a long time to get even to this point, with cable costs slowly declining.
At 10Gbps speeds, each transition is a potential bottleneck.
With volume and experience, the methods will improve, and hopefully also drive the costs down.