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Prices of Thunderbolt Cables Likely to Drop in 2013
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Clearly no one is making cheap USB 3.0 cables. Case in point:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10303&cs_id=1030309&p_id=6504&seq=1&format=2
Yes, I know. I just gave examples for reasoning that fast connection can be made with passive cables and if it's more affordable, then it's more reasonable.
Funny that at present time to carry tb's bandwidth, it would be more affordable to use multiple hdmi connections or any other connections than the tb itself. So far most "not the best bang for a buck" solutions for consumer market has failed. This does not predict very bright future for tb. Remember rdram?
Maybe tb is still too complex, a bit like dp was at the beginning and maybe tb will survive, but Apple's priorities offering new technologies is just so far of what I would think being best value for customers.
Usb3 has been mature enough to be offered for years. Nevertheless they posponed it as long as possible without loosing their face and touted about tb, which also crippled (in a way) dp.
I guess I'm not the only mac user, who could have enjoyed the benefits of usb3 for years with my mac now.
Tb and usb3 is pretty much the opposites of cable tech and quality control. The other is most expensive and rarest thing you can find and the other one is the most produced and cheapest cable on earth. Since it doesn't carry lethal voltage, there's no regulations which it officially have to meet. Cable factories in China try to save every last penny they can and of course there's a lot of quality problems.
I've purchased Seagate's enclosures, where cable's where packed with so tight that they were almost broken from the beginning. No-name vendors will have even worser quality.
On the other hand, there are high quality usb cables with very affordable price and tb will never meet those prices.
Cable length is not necessary the defining factor here. That dongle might not have active cable circuits in both ends. It might convert tb to ethernet at the tb side and the rest of cable can be just passive cat and socket.
Okay, I'll correct the time to 1.5 years. What's the answer then?
Yes, if you need longer than specs allow, you need active cable. Big rooms need this. I've worked in all kind of presentations, so there's nothing new here. But the question remains, is tb really technologically good and cost-effective choice, when it needs very expensive cables even with shortest lengths and at the same time older standards do better?
Maybe I'm too negative or criticize too harshly Apple's decisions, but I've been really disappointed to new Macs for years now. Maybe I'll have to switch away. Every new release brings something amazing to the package, but takes away more features important for me.
They just gave us Retina mac, but took away 17" AND matte screen AND upgrading ram and storage. Usb3 came about 2 years too late. Hdmi came to macbooks about 5 years too late. Now they can't support external retinas because of crippled dp in tb. Macpro has been a big (and expensive) joke for years and will be that at least about an year. And where are the new imacs? Do they once again take away features that doesn't make the product any better? Do we get mac mini with usb3 before 2014?
While it may be more affordable to use multiple HDMI cables, it would be utterly impractical. It would require four HDMI ports and cables to approximate a single Thunderbolt port and cable.
HDMI uses 3 TMDS channels operating at a maximum rate of 3.4 Gbps to create a single, half-duplex link capable of carrying 10.2 Gbps, or 8.16 Gbps after accounting for 8b/10b overhead.
DisplayPort 1.2 uses 4 lanes at up to 5.4 Gbps to create a single, half-duplex, main link of 21.6 Gbps, or 17.28 Gbps less 8b/10b overhead. There are currently zero DisplayPort 1.2 HBR panels or MST hubs on the market though, despite the first sink device silicon receiving certification on August 10, 2011. So all existing DisplayPort gear operates at only 2.7 Gbps per lane, 10.8 Gbps per link, or 8.64 Gbps without encoding overhead.
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed mode utilizes 2 dedicated signaling pairs to create a single, full-duplex 5 Gbps link, which provides 4 Gbps without 8b/10b overhead.
Thunderbolt combines 4 signaling pairs operating at 10.3125 Gbps to create 2 full-duplex channels capable of transporting 10 Gbps. That's a symbol rate 3.8x DisplayPort, 3.0x HDMI and more than 2x USB 3.0. Reliably achieving these kinds of speeds is currently a non-trivial engineering problem at power levels reasonable for a mobile device. This is the first time an interface anything like this has been included standard on a consumer PC. If your work flow can actually benefit from a 10 Gbps I/O port, Thunderbolt has the potential to be a massively less expensive solution than the other currently available options.
Apple did not postpone inclusion of USB 3.0 for years. As soon as Intel included it, they did. 2012 will mark the first year that USB 3.0 will even achieve a 50% attach rate for new PCs and motherboards. USB 3.0 has only been available for 2.5 years from any manufacturer. Quarterly production of USB 3.0 controllers did not even exceed 10m until Q3 2011. To say that USB 3.0 was ubiquitous before this year is a gross overstatement of the situation, with only 6.5% of PCs in the wild having at least one port by the end of 2011.
And to say that Thunderbolt crippled DisplayPort is just not accurate either. Current Thunderbolt controllers are capable of carrying up to two DP 1.1a streams. Intel's HD Graphics 3000 was not even capable of outputting DP 1.2. The 2012 Macs with Cactus Ridge controllers may actually be capable of outputting DisplayPort 1.2 signals over their Thunderbolt ports when used in DP mode, but there's not much way of knowing since there are precisely zero DisplayPort 1.2 panels or MST hubs available on the market to test this with. Until there exists a display that cannot be driven by Thunderbolt due to it only supporting DP 1.1a, this simply does not affect anyone. It is of absolutely no consequence in the real world at this juncture.
Even being active and made by Apple, Thunderbolt cables are actually just about the cheapest cables available that can handle symbol rates of 10.3125 GBaud. And they're not terribly hard to find. Granted you can't pick one up at the local pharmacy, but then again they've only been on the market 18 months, versus over 14 years for USB. Also bear in mind that the cheapest cable Apple sells goes for $19. Thunderbolt cables aren't a bad value at $49.
The Ethernet controller is located on the Ethernet end of the dongle, along with the Port Ridge Thunderbolt controller. However, the cable length is very short, and it only needs to carry a single Thunderbolt channel, so it may well not require the same active circuitry as the 2m cable.
As was the topic of the original article, Thunderbolt cables from other vendors have just entered the market this month, but as yet, none of them are selling for any less than Apple's offering. Clearly Apple has been aggressive with the price of their cable, even at $49, in order to promote adoption of the technology. Cables that operate at 10 Gbps per channel are generally found in data centers and HPC environments, not on the desktop. This is not the same as the far slower and more mature technologies you keep comparing it to, and thus it just can't be made as inexpensively.
If you don't think Thunderbolt is a good value proposition already, then you don't need need 10 Gbps I/O period. Making it cheaper won't change that.
2 years ago, the same number of PCs had USB 3.0 as had Thunderbolt one year agoi.e. a tiny minority. Mini DP to HDMI adapters are less than $10 and have been available for years. I find it kind of odd that Apple even chose to include an HDMI port on the MBPR. Point to a single display in existence that cannot be driven by the DP implementation used by Thunderbolt. And of course we will have new iMacs and minis before the year is out.
...and today a fair percentage of systems have USB 3.0, and still only a tiny minority have T-Bolt.
Your point?
I don't...
Oh man that looks like a fire hazard waiting to happen. So many people on here are drinking too much thunderbolt kool-aid. Apple got a couple peripherals out the door with it, and beyond that it's unlikely that they care. The people who expected fast adoption and immediate cheap peripherals were all out of their minds given the required driver and hardware development combined with the chip cost for a product that serves a very limited market (high bandwidth requirements and stuck to a macbook pro).
Hardware is the major issue. Once you have the controllers pushing data down the cable, it appears just like a PCIe bus to the hardware at opposite ends.
I thought it still required a costly chip at the end of the chain. Intel's part numbers suggested that daisy chainable and non chainable devices also required different parts. What you mention would most likely facilitate development of mac pro type peripherals for the macbook pro. I know Black Magic Design made thunderbolt versions of their products, but that's still a highly specific market.
Well, precisely, that was my point. Two years ago, USB 3.0 had a lower attach rate than Thunderbolt does today. The six-fold increase in USB 3.0 adoption in 2012 is almost entirely due to Intel's including it in the Panther Point chipsets. Saying that Apple was holding back on USB 3.0 support in 2010 is ridiculous. The whole industry was waiting until the controllers and drivers were ready for prime time.
To be more clear, "it appears just like a volatile (the bus comes and goes) hot-pluggable (the devices come and go) dynamic (the bus topology changes) PCIe bus".
The driver for an internal PCIe device probably needs some modifications to handle these events.
It is nice to see that the price of this marvellous device will come down and will be more budget friendly.
It does require that costly chip at the end. Once you have that support whatever is at each end appears as if it was over a PCIe bus. Now OS X and drivers? We know that joke.
2011 was a big year too. While not native, only bargain basement entry level boards were limited to USB 2.0. Vendors were happy enough to slap in an additional USB 3.0 controller for a few dollars and wire it. DMI 2.0 with all that bandwidth was the biggest factor and not the price of controllers.
I would not try hot swapping cards from internal PCIe slots either.
Only 77m USB 3.0 controllers shipped in 2011 vs. 352.8m PCs worldwide. So best case would be 20% of new PCs having USB 3.0 in 2011. And of course AMD did beat Intel to the punch and manage to achieve some chipset integration in 2011. Nonetheless, there seems to be this notion that most PCs on the market last year included USB 3.0, when in actuality it was only 1 in 5.
And while folks are busy complaining that things they don't have any use for are too expensive, here's some more fuel for the fire: http://www.attotech.com/products/family.php?id=15
See these are the products I envisioned when Thunderbolt was introduced. Although I did imagine them to be a bit smaller and not quite as fugly...
And I am still waiting for a decent external Thunderbolt GPU box for a MacBook Air...
I would not try hot swapping cards from internal PCIe slots either.
That was extremely funny.
They cost about as much as I anticipated when reading the word "Atto" in the link. I wouldn't necessarily look at the overall PC market on usb3. Many of the more expensive non workstation PCs did adopt it as a selling point. Beyond that, many people on here have the false notion that Apple should always be first with these things. They're actually quite conservative with most of their additions.
Well it would need to work with bootcamp or that would eliminate much of their potential market. It is important to note that the macbook air chips have lower total bandwidth allocation than the others. I'm not sure whether this presents an issue of greater significance. Do you think many will appear though? It seems like a somewhat limited market.
Well as I mentioned before, the video card will be detected as if it was over a PCIe bridge to Windows. Hot swapping might be out of the question but rebooting tends to solve Thunderbolt oddities in Windows unless you are dealing with firmware bugs.
Sonnet Technology has some rather expensive Thunderbolt to PCIe slot solutions and MSI keeps show casing their GUS II without every delivering. After that I recall at least one other vendor but a link escapes me.
I would be better off getting a MacBook Pro and using the GT 650M. The MacBook Air is limited to a single bidirectional 10 Gbps channel.
...don't stop laughing, but....
Hot plug memory and controller cards is a feature on mid-range servers:
I would not try hot swapping cards from internal PCIe slots either.
Hot plug memory and controller cards is a feature on mid-range servers:
I am not surprised. Fancy controllers, power circuitry, and the drivers to keep your OS of choice from throwing a fit when you just have to swap out a mission critical card sounds well...par for the course.
Thunderbolt? Eh...yeah I hope I can hot swap my external storage. Video card? HAH!
That represents a market where downtime is planned whenever possible. Were you suggesting this as a feature that could eventually be leveraged?
Sonnet tends to get things out quickly, but you pay for them. This has always been the case. I remember them using a somewhat limited power supply too. I didn't realize the GT 650m was that big of an improvement over the 6770 in games. I don't typically play them.
You could, if it's the last storage device on the chain. If not, probably need to reboot.
T-Bolt devices are hot-plug PCIe devices - it has to be addressed unless you want to reboot every time you connect or disconnect a T-Bolt cable.
And, by the way, an ExpressCard is a hot-plug PCIe device as well - so a simplified version of the problem is already addressed. (The device is hot-plug, but the PCIe bus is static.)
The 2011 MacBook Airs used the DSL2310 Eagle Ridge controller which only allows for a single Thunderbolt port, but it has 2x 10 Gbps, full-duplex channels just like any other Thunderbolt port. It also has the same PCIe 2.0 x4 back-end as the 4-channel controllers. It is limited to a single DP sink protocol adapter and lacks a DP source protocol adapter, but from a PCIe standpoint it is not limited in any way.
The 2012 MacBook Air uses the DSL3510L Cactus Ridge 4-channel controller, which is the same one used in the new MacBook Pros.
I forgot about Express cards. That is less amusing than imagining someone hot plugging a graphics card in a mac pro
.The thing I have issue with is this:
In your own thought-experiment, take two thunderbolt devices connected by a thunderbolt cable. Now cut the ends of the cable and put the ends inside the tb devices.
Now you have two (differently designed) thunderbolt devices, communicating perfectly with each other as before, but via a cheap, passive cable.
The benefit being, you only buy the expensive electronics once per device, not twice per cable.
Why on earth didn't they implement it like that???
To ask the question a different way, why did Silicon Image not decide to put the transmit and receive electronics into the DVI cable (or HDMI). They could have done so, but they thought that would be a daft idea.
In your own thought-experiment, take two thunderbolt devices connected by a thunderbolt cable. Now cut the ends of the cable and put the ends inside the tb devices.
Now you have two (differently designed) thunderbolt devices, communicating perfectly with each other as before, but via a cheap, passive cable.
The benefit being, you only buy the expensive electronics once per device, not twice per cable.
Why on earth didn't they implement it like that???
To ask the question a different way, why did Silicon Image not decide to put the transmit and receive electronics into the DVI cable (or HDMI). They could have done so, but they thought that would be a daft idea.
Of course, I meant that more lanes could be used in one cable. Not multiple sockets for one datapath.
Good selection of numbers you have.
I think that when tb designers were pushing the envelope a bit too much when they made the hard decisions somewhere in 2010. Maybe they didn't realize, that to make a new useful standard, it has to be mass-adopted by consumers to get price efficient.
We are very close to the time, when "pro" tech will not be more advanced than consumer tech. Pushing the envelope is getting so expensive, that you simply can't do that with any smaller market size than the biggest.
Seems that every generation of designers and engineers have to try to make kind of new thing that should be "the thing to rule them all", only to see that next same thing is done 5 years later.
Now we still can't be sure if tb will even succeed being alive for that many years.
Usb3 was released in 2008, 8 years later than usb2.
If usb4 comes in 2016 with greater speed than tb now, a fraction of price of tb and there's no tb2 at the time, tb will die slowly away.
Then we can keep speculating that if tb had had 8 pairs of wires in the cable and therefore used cheap passive cables, it would have become as popular as usb...
I disagree fully.
Apple could have included usb3 in macs in 2010.
And more usb3 controllers were sold in 2010 than macs.
Now which one of these minorities are significant again and why?
There's no technical or economical reason for not to do this, if they would have wanted to maintain state-of-the-art imago. Saving $5 chip in cost just isn't that. Maybe this is just the one legacy baggage that Apple is carrying. After fw loosing to usb, they couldn't just face their defeat and had to come up something sexier than usb and that became tb. Also tb might be a whole lot less sexier, if macs would have had usb3 before tb.
Although you can't realise from controller sales numbers how much certain port is used and even more importantly how much there was benefit using this port compared to other alternatives, I just don't get this when something is widely enough accepted. Do you have to sell 40 million controllers a year, before you can say that the used standard is adopted? It would be very interesting to know how many tb devices has been sold that really benefits from tb? 4 digits or even 5? Tb displays and fw & ethernet dongles should be excluded from the list, since all these would be handled more price efficiently with usb3.
I just don't get this excuse that Apple shouldn't have included usb3 before it has certain percentage of market adoption. How about using the same rule for tb? Is there some reason why macs should be some kind of "average PC" and therefore have only features that most computers have? Does retina need to be ubiquitous to be justified? Comparing pc market to macs is just plain stupid old fruit comparison. When most of pc crap is way cheaper than macs, you just can't expect them having any advanced tech. On the other hand almost all pc hardware in macs' price group has had usb3 (and bd) for second of third year now.
State of the Macs is getting so very sad. They can't offer 17" OR matte (they were making profits with additional $50 charge on matte coating, but seems to be that not enough, also maybe offering matte screen would imply that there's something wrong with glossy ones...) OR usb3 at the same time! Oh well, maybe there will come some really working usb3 drivers for expresscard for my matte 17"...
They can't put usb3 OR tb to MP and at the same time MSI is selling mb with both included to windows markets...
Just compare usb3 and tb 18 months after first products were on the shelf. Usb3 had 100x more different products and adoption rate than tb. Maybe 1% of mac users will ever use tb and at the same time 99% of users will benefit usb3. Apple's customers who bought mac in 2010-2012 would also benefit from usb3 still many years. Apple chose not to offer it, since so few undersood to even ask it and now they can buy new macbooks sooner than ever before.
Well, we are in the verge of external retina displays. If Apple brings any kind of other external display to market, it will be disappointment. (Hmm, next model could be also just the same as now, but with usb3. Even if the display doesn't have intel's chipset that includes usb3...
) And with their situation with tb versus retina they have to either drop external monitors from their products altogether or limit the amount of external retina displays to one per mac or upgrade tb specs and have a mess with angry customers, whose expensive hardware just turned obsolete even before anybody thought. None of the options are very nice for anybody.So, maybe those cables should have stayed where they belong and the desktop alternatives should be designed with better price efficiency?
Yes it will.
Nobody, needs anything that is too expensive and everybody wants as fast as they can reasonably justify to afford. So there's no binary solution for this.
Maybe with better design and more forward thinking all customers who bought a mac from 2010 onwards, would have enjoyed usb3 AND multiple future retinas AND 10x cheaper tb than what it is now. Now, none of this happened and will not happen for few years in future.
If macs would had usb3 over 2 years now, maybe usb3 would had been adopted way faster. But yes, hdmi in new mbp is quite an oddball, maybe average mac user is stupid enough for not to know that dp-hdmi dongle does the same thing OR maybe Apple is preparing their customers to that if you want 2 external displays, the retina one takes the whole tb and the second external, non-retina model can use the hdmi OR if you need all tb bandwidth for data, you can use hdmi for display, which then does not take any bandwidth away from tb.
Also, a very tiny fraction of computers, but still few million mbp's have tb but no usb3. Unfortunately there might never be a affordable tb-usb3 dongle or tb hub to use more these dongles...
Again there were more usb3 controllers sold than macs. Are they both not significant then?
Again, that 20% of pc's were on price group of macs and had usb3. At the same time the macs did not have. Is this a sign of bad design in pc's or macs?
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Good question!
Either way, chips inside the device or inside the cable, you need same amount of them, so it doesn't affect the price of the whole system.