Thunderbolt and mDP

[Macsavvytech]

After a quick look on Wikipedia (and some other cites to check its valid) I noticed that mini Display Port has twice the bandwidth of the specifications for the original release of light peak. Now after seeing those thunderbolt ports on the front page it made me wonder maybe apple is actually going to do something for the customers. Would it be possible with a firmware update that we could plug in a light peak device into our mini display ports? In my mind it also makes sense as why would apple choose a connection that is compatible with all PCs when they could release a connector compatible with only the latest macbook pros now this is purely speculation but if you look at these snippets from Wikipedia it makes me wonder, especially since they picture the thunderbolt port in the same form factor as the old mini display port.

Quote from Wikipedia on Light-Peak

The HDMI and DisplayPort connectors require more than twice the 10 Gbit/s that Light Peak was proposed to include in its higher-end implementations – very much higher than what commentators expect Copper Peak to be capable of. Given announcements that Intel would support DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a exclusively, it seems unlikely that Light Peak will compete with them in the near future:

PS: I do not mind someone with knowledge telling me that what I am say is not possible

 

[Macsavvytech]

Just Remembering it occurred to me that mDP is no and optic port right? so what i suggested is not possible

 

[m85476585]

Probably not. The MDP in old MBPs comes straight out of the GPU, so it's not meant to dump DMA data on. In other words, the hardware is only designed to do video, and it would take more than a firmware change to change that.

This iteration of LightPeak is over copper, which is probably why they dropped the LP name. The optical version simply isn't ready yet, and Intel is doing everything they can to try to get it to succeed. They are artificially restricting USB3 by not putting it in their chipsets, and they are trying to push *something* that's like LightPeak out the door to try to take market share away from the competition like USB3. To me it seems like Intel is abusing their power as a near monopoly to try to get LP going. I would be more upset about it, but if LP takes off, it could be really good.

My guess is the problem with optical LP is making it fast and cheap at the same time. 10G optical is still not at the consumer price point, and no one is going to pay hundreds of dollars more for something like this when USB3 would be 90% as good.