That SD slot will be going as well in the near future
Hope not. Check this out.
http://hothardware.com/News/Lexar-Introduces-New-HighCapacity-400x-SDXC-UHSI-Card/
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SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Promises 10Gbps Data Transfers, Coming in 2014
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Hope not. Check this out.
http://hothardware.com/News/Lexar-Introduces-New-HighCapacity-400x-SDXC-UHSI-Card/
I am not moving the goalposts. Things are as they are, the decisions that Apple and Intel have made would have been started many years ago. From what you have suggested they should have retained DP and introduced thunderbolt to compete with USB 3? How could that work?
If you can afford a 5000k monitor, then you can afford to upgrade your 2012 mac. That falls under **** happens.
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That is pretty awesome but how much will it cost? Also apple needs to let you slide those suckers all the way inside.
Oh yeah. That happens ALL the time.
Well I walk people through that step at least 4 times a day?
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It can. When using a Thunderbolt cable to restore a user account to a fresh/newly erased Mac it doubles the speed. We advise customers to restore either via Ethernet cable (Time Capsule) or a Thunderbolt cable. USB transfer times are nearly double when restoring.
I'm one of the people arguing that TB and USB 3 are not competing standards.
Again, I don't get what you don't understand : video is not a strength of Thunderbolt, it's an afterthought.
That's it. You didn't know, now you do. Move on.
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Actually, do a ioreg on a Mac and locate the SD card reader. Guess what, it's a USB device, it just happens to be internally rather than externally connected. It's not even a USB 3 device.
(IIRC).
Honestly I am not very savvy about the internal workings of Macs. I just know from experience that Ethernet/Thunderbolt/Firewire are much faster than using USB 2.0 after an erase/install/restore user. I don't know why, but I have witnessed the difference. I've seen an 8 hour restore cancelled, switched to Thunderbolt and the restore time dropped to 2 hours. Usually it's about half, but I saw that particular example two weeks ago.
Give me an example of any techlologies that was not embraced by consumers and succeeded. TB was designed for gadgets that are mainly used by retail consumers, and it does not need consumer adoption?
This is MacRumor forum, and most of us here are gadget consumers. This site is not even as technical as Anandtech site. you think that most of members here are engineers? I am but I would not think so. We are apple fans, gadget lovers or consumers. please don't praise yourself too much.
you are completely missing the point I made. does not matter what it can do including cook you breakfast, if it is expensive and supports few devices, it will remain in a minor market.
All of Apple products are for retail consumers. Apple has little to no presence in Enterprise market. if Apple designs and makes TB, it is intended for RETAIL CONSUMERS. Are you trying to make a new business use case for Apple product TB?
it seems that you got drunk into TB tech detail and love it so much that you try to defend it using your "superior" TB knowledge. Did you also defend Firewire back then too? because it was superior to USB
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It has been in Macs for about a year or more. Do you mean the Mac Pro? The only way Thunderbolt would compliment USB 3.0 is if it offered up some affordable devices. It would be nice not to have to replace my 2011 Mac Mini simply to gain a USB 3.0 port (seeing that it has TB), but it's probably cheaper (roughly speaking) for me to do that than to buy an external hard drive option with Thunderbolt. And despite what others say, USB 2.0 is not an acceptable transfer rate even for trying to view more than one film on a device at once. My USB 3.0 external hard drive is perfectly fast enough for my purposes, and the difference between it on my rMBP and Mini are night and day. Would have been nice to have Thunderbolt working economically as well.
Does anyone remember when the Intel people were considering the use of a USB connector for Thunderbolt? That would have been something...but they would have had to merge two technologies to implement that - which would have been nigh impossible.
That's why you need one of these!
http://theniftyminidrive.com/
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You're forgetting the professional audio/video market, which Apple has quite a strong following in.
Think about it. What does grandma need with an SSD RAID 10 NAS hooked up over a fiber optic cable? It's set ups like this that TB excels at. High performance devices at a high price meant to be used by people who need it. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for the entry level user crowd. At least not yet.
Apple can have deep pocket to support a niche market. what about third parties? if not, availibility and compalibility can be problematic.
I also don't see them as competing standards, but if Thunderbolt had not taken the DP form factor, and DP had shipped alongside a different Thunderbolt, then they would have competed in a lot of areas, and its hard to see how it would be successful.
I never once tried to convince you of Thunderbolt video superiority, I am just stating my opinion that its a clever and continuing business model from Apple and that most Apple users will be well served by it.
When Apple started signing deals with Intel over thunderbolt were they aware of the issues you talk about? How many years ago did Apple start planning this out? You make the best moves available to you at the time. Could Apple have planned this better?
You claim that 2012 macs will not be able to power the latest (unreleased) high end monitors. I have taken you at your word that is true (I have nfi) and simply stated this will not be a major problem for most consumers. People who spend 5k on a monitor will be educated and moneyed up enough to find a solution that works for them, I guess this is one of the reasons why we have not seen Thunderbolt brought to the Mac Pro. If a top spec 2012 Mac Pro could not drive a display shipping in early 2013 then that really would be a problem.
I think you may need to up your comprehension of others posts, and tone down your arrogance.
There is a reason those Thunderbolt cables are $50 ...
They are a tuned transmission line with active termination at each end for data speed and reliability.
Try running data at that speed over a 3 meter cable and see what you end up with at the other end without that technology in the cable.
I think that somewhere in apple corporate is a dept that decides price.
So, to address the original post, the USB 3.0 Promoter's Group (i.e. a bunch of marketers) announced at CES that the USB-IF is continuing to revise the USB standard (i.e. doing their job), and that the next specification release to introduce a speed increase is possibly due as soon as Q4 2014. As we have all witnessed time and again with USB, the release of the specification paves the way, but chipset integration by Intel is the true harbinger of widespread adoption (or any adoption by Apple in the last go round).
So let's see...
USB 1.1 spec released Q3 1998, integrated by Intel Q2 1999
USB 2.0 spec released Q2 2000, integrated by Intel Q2 2002
USB 3.0 spec released Q4 2008, integrated by Intel Q2 2012
USB x.x spec released Q4 2014, integrated by Intel...
Well, the facts are that USB has always used its physical layer gross bitrate as its advertised speed, inclusive of all encoding and protocol overhead. USB 2.0 was advertised as 480 Mbit/s, however it was only a half-duplex connection that employed 8b/10b encoding and required a significant amount of protocol overhead. So real world speeds never tend to exceed 320 Mbit/s, and only in one direction at a time. USB 3.0 SuperSpeed mode is full-duplex, but once again the advertised speed is 5 Gbit/s, which includes 8b/10b encoding. So really it's a 4 Gbit/s link, but protocol overhead has thus far kept devices from exceeding 2.8 Gbit/s. If the connectors and cables are essentially staying the same, then we can presume that the next gen of SuperSpeed USB is still using a single pair each for send and receive, and bumping the signaling rate to 10 GT/s. If so, then unless the encoding and protocol change considerably, we can expect real world transfer rates of 5.6 Gbit/s, or a bit better than what was advertised for the current generation.
Thunderbolt advertises the single channel bitrate without including encoding. Since each link is 2 full-duplex channels, and the protocol overhead is lower than USB, it offers more than 5x the net bandwidth of SuperSpeed USB. Also, due to the architecture, a 4-channel Thunderbolt controller offers more than 10x the front-end bandwidth of a 4-port USB 3.0 controller.
Well, since Intel designed the Light/Eagle/Cactus Ridge controllers for platforms on which they only provided DisplayPort 1.1a pixel pipelines, it wasn't really a weakness at all, was it? More like a sensible design decision. The first DP 1.2 enabled displays only hit retail a couple weeks ago, and only require DP 1.2 for MST. 4K displays with DP 1.2 inputs still don't exist in the wild, to my knowledge. And as you noted, Intel is planning to release Redwood Ridge controllers with DP 1.2 support alongside their next generation of chipsets anyway.
To all those saying that Cat 6a is dirt cheap, you might want to check the cost per port of 10GBASE-T NICs and switches. There is no free lunch at 10 Gbit/s. Thunderbolt is the cheapest 10 Gbit/s per channel technology available BY FAR at about $100 per port, and that's for 2-channel, full-duplex ports. Almost everything else on the market is close to $500/port or more.
And to all those saying Thunderbolt is dead, you clearly don't understand the relevant economics. As long as Apple cares to keep paying for them, Intel will continue to manufacture Thunderbolt controllers. At this point Apple still buys FireWire 800 controllers by the millions. Dead is when the largest purchaser of semiconductors in the world no longer wants to buy your product, not when they're including it in nearly every PC they make.
So let's see...
USB 1.1 spec released Q3 1998, integrated by Intel Q2 1999
USB 2.0 spec released Q2 2000, integrated by Intel Q2 2002
USB 3.0 spec released Q4 2008, integrated by Intel Q2 2012
USB x.x spec released Q4 2014, integrated by Intel...
Well, the facts are that USB has always used its physical layer gross bitrate as its advertised speed, inclusive of all encoding and protocol overhead. USB 2.0 was advertised as 480 Mbit/s, however it was only a half-duplex connection that employed 8b/10b encoding and required a significant amount of protocol overhead. So real world speeds never tend to exceed 320 Mbit/s, and only in one direction at a time. USB 3.0 SuperSpeed mode is full-duplex, but once again the advertised speed is 5 Gbit/s, which includes 8b/10b encoding. So really it's a 4 Gbit/s link, but protocol overhead has thus far kept devices from exceeding 2.8 Gbit/s. If the connectors and cables are essentially staying the same, then we can presume that the next gen of SuperSpeed USB is still using a single pair each for send and receive, and bumping the signaling rate to 10 GT/s. If so, then unless the encoding and protocol change considerably, we can expect real world transfer rates of 5.6 Gbit/s, or a bit better than what was advertised for the current generation.
Thunderbolt advertises the single channel bitrate without including encoding. Since each link is 2 full-duplex channels, and the protocol overhead is lower than USB, it offers more than 5x the net bandwidth of SuperSpeed USB. Also, due to the architecture, a 4-channel Thunderbolt controller offers more than 10x the front-end bandwidth of a 4-port USB 3.0 controller.
Well, since Intel designed the Light/Eagle/Cactus Ridge controllers for platforms on which they only provided DisplayPort 1.1a pixel pipelines, it wasn't really a weakness at all, was it? More like a sensible design decision. The first DP 1.2 enabled displays only hit retail a couple weeks ago, and only require DP 1.2 for MST. 4K displays with DP 1.2 inputs still don't exist in the wild, to my knowledge. And as you noted, Intel is planning to release Redwood Ridge controllers with DP 1.2 support alongside their next generation of chipsets anyway.
To all those saying that Cat 6a is dirt cheap, you might want to check the cost per port of 10GBASE-T NICs and switches. There is no free lunch at 10 Gbit/s. Thunderbolt is the cheapest 10 Gbit/s per channel technology available BY FAR at about $100 per port, and that's for 2-channel, full-duplex ports. Almost everything else on the market is close to $500/port or more.
And to all those saying Thunderbolt is dead, you clearly don't understand the relevant economics. As long as Apple cares to keep paying for them, Intel will continue to manufacture Thunderbolt controllers. At this point Apple still buys FireWire 800 controllers by the millions. Dead is when the largest purchaser of semiconductors in the world no longer wants to buy your product, not when they're including it in nearly every PC they make.
Sorry I meant the new super speed USB the article was talking about, and I guess further USB development in general.
That nifty drive looks awesome. I am not very mobile atm, but when I must be again, I planned to remove the superdrive and put in an SSD. This is also an option now. Cheers for the heads up.
I'm one of the people arguing that TB and USB 3 are not competing standards.
Again, I don't get what you don't understand : video is not a strength of Thunderbolt, it's an afterthought.
...
Actually, do a ioreg on a Mac and locate the SD card reader. Guess what, it's a USB device, it just happens to be internally rather than externally connected. It's not even a USB 3 device.
(IIRC).
While I agree about USB and Thunderbolt being complimentary, display capability was not in any way an afterthought.
If you look at a diagram of an LGA 1155 platform, you can see that 90% of the CPU's I/O is reserved for graphics or display applications, and the PCH has 17.28 Gbit/s of FDI bandwidth but only 16 Gbit/s for the DMI (although the DMI is full-duplex). Furthermore, HD Graphics 4000 occupies 1/3 of the die area of an Ivy Bridge CPU. Display is clearly very important to Intel's customers. It is no coincidence that the back end of most Thunderbolt controllers is nearly identical to that of the PCH: 2x DP 1.1a is the equivalent of FDI and PCIe 2.0 x4 is the same as DMI 2.0 x4.
And YDRC, most Macs use a PCIe based Broadcom BCM57100 controller for the SD card slot. This chip also contains a GbE controller which goes entirely unused on the Retina MBPs, however this allows them to fully support UHS-I transfer rates up to 104 MB/s. I believe the MBA does only have a USB connection for the SD card though.
Yeah. Too bad that they backed the wrong horse. Oh well.
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...And the future for Apple’s ”non consumer” customers doesn’t look the brightest, does it?
Those customers will be fine. The transition will be rough, but once they are done with it, they will never even look back.
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Intel makes the Thunderbolt controllers, that's their IP and I'm not aware of them having plans to license it to anybody else.
Intel does not make any part of the Thunderbolt cables currently on the market. Those are all based on transceivers produced by Gennum, whose assets have since been acquired by Semtech. The Intersil products, and similar ones from TI and others, will significantly reduce the BOM cost of copper Thunderbolt cables when they finally make it to market. I would expect that to happen this year.
The price of devices is governed by the cost of the controllers, and the price of the cables by the cost of the transceivers.
I'm of the impression that Apple is already heavily subsidizing Thunderbolt by burying the cost of the controllers used in their devices. As it stands, it's a $100 per port technology, and even still it's the least expensive of the 10 Gbit/s per channel technologies by about a factor of 5.
I'll also call BS on device OEMs who claim that the cost of Intel's Thunderbolt licensing program is what is deterring them. It's the cost of the controllers combined with the complexity of engineering the products themselves that has folks reckoning that they won't be able to make a reasonable return. There's no easy money to be had; it's a long jump.
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So long as Intel continues to back and push TB, I doubt it will die. Fact is it's a better system than USB, only more expensive. Prices will go down eventually. Optical will be here to stay. USB is good for cheap low-data peripherals, and will serve as compliment to TB for lower data ports.
As per everyone asking why we need such a cable/standard when USB is "fast enough"... people thought the same thing with 256 MB HDDs.
As per everyone asking why we need such a cable/standard when USB is "fast enough"... people thought the same thing with 256 MB HDDs.
Really?
And where did you get that idea? Walmart sells players for <$50 and disc's for as low as $10. That's usually a good sign of mass adoption. Kinda like thong underwear - you knew they hit mainstream when Sears and Walmart were selling them...
I don't know about you, but my several thousand title media collection (pretty much all formats since the 1920's - 4 formats of vinyl, tapes, CD's, VHS, DVD's and Bluray's) won't fit, even compressed, on any computer I can afford to own. And I'll not give them up until I can afford to store them all on a lossless format, which today will run me at least 1-2000TB - I don't even want to think what that would cost. And even the latest Digital Copies are starting to run high-def. I got the latest Bourne movie for Christmas and the Digital Copy that came with takes up 4-5 Gigs of my hard drive - .5% of my capacity and too close to 10% of my iPad's usable storage. Despite that it is still not as good quality-wise as running the disc in my PS3 and watching on my TV - eg: I don't get any soundtrack choices on the Digital Copy and am stuck with the Dolby soundtrack as opposed to the superior DTS soundtrack, both of which are available on the disc version. Granted, I probably have a higher than average-sized media collection, but most people I know own enough media to put a fairly significant dent in their hard drive's capacity and more than enough to fill any iPod/Pad/Phone. And not a few of us are happy with compressed media - I can live with it on my iPod in the noisy environment of my car, or tooling around the kitchen, but when I want to listen to music, I want to hear it. All of it.
There is no "optical" T-Bolt
There is no "optical" T-Bolt today - only copper.
There is no system with an optical T-Bolt port - only copper.
There is no peripheral with an optical T-Bolt port - only copper.
If T-Bolt survives to T-Bolt 2.0 with optical connections, it will most certainly be incompatible with copper T-Bolt 1.0.
There is no "optical" T-Bolt today - only copper.
There is no system with an optical T-Bolt port - only copper.
There is no peripheral with an optical T-Bolt port - only copper.
If T-Bolt survives to T-Bolt 2.0 with optical connections, it will most certainly be incompatible with copper T-Bolt 1.0.
Hmmm ... Seems like someone could make fiber optic cables incorporating the optical transducers within the connectors which would work with existing equipment and allow longer, more noise immune distances between devices.
Well i always wanted usb 3.0 on my iMac but I have decided to wait for a retina iMac this will be bonus when i come to change my mid 2010 model.
Oh good, let's see :
- FiberChannel
- ECC Memory
- Server Blades
- iSCSI over Ethernet
- GBICs
- LoM
- NUMA
- Cray, The SuperComputer company
I could go on, but at this point, I think you get the point that you're in over your head. Consumers don't drive all success in the technological, IT, computing fields. Thunderbolt doesn't have to succeed in the consumer market to be a success. That Apple is implementing it in consumer level machines does not mean it is intended as a consumer level technology, nor that its designed in a way to reflect consumer level pricing.