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Thunderbolt Coming to PCs in April 2012

ericinboston said:
So USB 3.0, which is 10x faster than 2.0, is only good for USB 1.0 stuff (mice, keyboards)?!
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You need an USB connector for keyboards, unless you want to go backwards to PS2 connection.

I also mention about fast time with thumb drives (read other drives as well). So I am with you on this.

Point being, less is more when it comes to Economies Of Scales. A few USB3 and a few Thunderbolt connectors and I'm set.
 
Finally

I have been holding off on buying a computer waiting for the launch of Thunderbolt on non-Apple computers. I can't wait to have a modern computer I have been stuck with a Pentium 4 system and an Intel Atom netbook for some time now (oh the pain). A big thank you to people at Intel (and Apple to a lesser extent) who made this technology possible.
 
I think Thunderbolt is not too likely to fade like FireWire has (though FireWire remains, except for the clumsy omission on the aluminum MacBooks--the ones that were not called Pro for strange marketing purposes) for the reasons that unlike FireWire, Thunderbolt is the only display port shipping on Macs, meaning it has a claim to stay on board even if it isn't used for data. Also, I think competition among wired I/O cable technologies is coming to its anticlimactic end, as most all consumer focus is on wireless transfers. It's almost moot to consider whether Apple could revive FireWire by making it the standard on iPods again (not that they will--they're the ones who demoted FireWire for cost savings), or whether they will come out with Thunderbolt iPods, iPads, and iPhones. They may, but as the years pass, how many users will use a cable regardless? It's a bit like Blu-Ray--Blu-Ray will probably never have widespread consumer enthusiasm, but because most people want to stream movies, it probably won't ever have a great physical media competitor.

At the same time USB has secured its place as the most recognized I/O interface and become the default (and sometimes legislated as) charging mechanism for many consumer devices.

The line-up of non-legacy interfaces is getting crowded. I would guess if any get dropped it would be FireWire--Apple isn't too sentimental about its own baby.
 
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ericinboston said:
sushi said:
Makes sense:
  • USB 3 for keyboards, mice and occasional fast transfers like thumb drives.
  • Thunderbolt for monitors, and applications requiring fast external HHD/SSD times, etc.

Sounds good. :)
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So USB 3.0, which is 10x faster than 2.0, is only good for USB 1.0 stuff (mice, keyboards)?!

Get real. USB 3.0 has been on the PC for well over a year now and literally hundreds of devices are 3.0 compliant while TB has what...literally 4 devices?!

I have 2 USB 3.0 drives and they absolutely fly compared to their 2.0 cousins. Even if USB 3.0 is merely 3x faster, that's still incredibly fast...that cuts my 160GB backup from a few hours to UNDER 1 hour. 3x the speed means 3x faster of course...so something taking 90 seconds now takes 30 seconds...or 30 minutes now taking 10 minutes.

Thunderbolt will be used by 1% of the world's consumers...just like Firewire. TB missed the boat on adoption.
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Actually, 3x the speed is 2x faster than.
 
...Firewire dead or not !

Thunderbolt, Mini Displayport, DVI, USB 2.0, USB 3.0...but I never use at once the FW 400/800...I think the next Macbook Pro will look better with 2x Thunderbolt ports and no FW:cool:
 
Glad to know that it will be hitting the wide market in the future. I really hope this piece of technology takes off. Hopefully the prices will be driven down and the peripherals that support it will not be too expensive.
 
I will finally be able to use my thunderbolt display for my desktop! Intel, shut up and take my money! Ivy Bridge motherboard, 7970, thunderbolt; it's gonna be a good year!
 
I dont care if you think USB 3.0 is better, I dont care if you think its gonna flop, maybe this will make Thunderbolt more main mainstream! Why argue? Don't the consumers (US) get better products with competition and innovation? :)
 
yanksrock100 said:
I dont care if you think USB 3.0 is better, I dont care if you think its gonna flop, maybe this will make Thunderbolt more main mainstream! Why argue? Don't the consumers (US) get better products with competition and innovation? :)
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But who cares about the consumer? Apple is more important.
 
gullySn0wCat said:
Finally! Hopefully we get some cheap TB gadgets soon:D
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Maybe... it's not just being marketed at Apple customers, but being low volume first generation devices that drives prices up. The Promise enclosure isn't even a real option for Mac Pro users which must have hurt it, and yeah plenty of people populate the internal bays + external devices.

WannaGoMac said:
Yes, just like Firewire. And look how well that went! oh wait... :)
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It remained a niche product, but many people depended on it.

sushi said:
Ah, but you can connect FW800 into your Thunderbolt connector.
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Expensive adapters are a crappy solution. Firmware bugs, flaky adapter hardware, etc. really make this a less than ideal solution.

DCJ001 said:
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Actually, 3x the speed is 2x faster than.
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Faster speeds have been available via PCI hardware for years. TB may use PCI lines, but it caps out at four, and even then I'm not sure it's lossless. I'm not sure why it debuted a year earlier for Apple. It hasn't really helped much other than marketing.
 
All I really care about is that the next gen of Macbook Pros have both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt.

I already have several USB 3.0 external drives and thumb drives and the fact they're backward-compatible with all my older computers is super-convenient.

Thunderbolt is great as a display port that can also transfer data, and I'll be happy it's there too.

But I honestly can't wait for Apple to support USB 3.0. The fact they currently aren't when the vast majority of high-speed peripherals are all USB 3.0 is beyond frustrating, and the #2 reason I'm still waiting to upgrade my MBP.

(#1 reason being the rumored ultra high-res MB screen that's in the works.)
 
ericinboston said:
So USB 3.0, which is 10x faster than 2.0, is only good for USB 1.0 stuff (mice, keyboards)?!

Get real. USB 3.0 has been on the PC for well over a year now and literally hundreds of devices are 3.0 compliant while TB has what...literally 4 devices?!

I have 2 USB 3.0 drives and they absolutely fly compared to their 2.0 cousins. Even if USB 3.0 is merely 3x faster, that's still incredibly fast...that cuts my 160GB backup from a few hours to UNDER 1 hour. 3x the speed means 3x faster of course...so something taking 90 seconds now takes 30 seconds...or 30 minutes now taking 10 minutes.

Thunderbolt will be used by 1% of the world's consumers...just like Firewire. TB missed the boat on adoption.
Click to expand...

Right, but how would you like to cut your backup from "UNDER 1 hour" to just a couple of minutes? USB 3.0 offers a theoretical maximum of 5 Gb/s. Meanwhile, TB offers 10 Gb/s bi-directionally. Not only that, but by 2018-2020, it will have expanded up to its 100 Gb/s potential. Who wants to use a technology that's 20 times slower?

In the technology world, its a mistake to say that something is "fast enough". Who was it, Bill Gates that said no computer would ever need more than 32KB of memory?

We always find more applications for faster hardware.

Also, TB is about a lot more than data transfer to external drives. Apple's implementation of the display shows some of its true potential. TB is pretty much PCIe externalized - instead of having a 2-3 inch wide connector, its less than a cm. Very useful.

TB may be like FW in that it is faster than the competition, but it offers much more potential. It will definitely be used by more than 1% of consumers. Guarantee it.
 
brand said:
You can if it is a Mac Pro or Mac Mini.
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As I understand it, Thunderbolt feeds directly from the PCI-E interface on the motherboard; i.e. it doesn't matter what GPU you use, you'll be able to run the display through the motherboard's interface.

Completely different point, anyone have any aesthetic points on the Mac Pro compared with the Lian-Li A71FB case? Always loved the Mac Pro case, but couldn't find one so I decided to get the next best thing (aesthetically).
 
My guess is that one place the Thunderbolt connection will be very useful is digital projectors used in movie theaters. The very high transfer rate (up to 20 gigabits per second) is more than enough for a 4000-line digital movie transferred from storage device to projector, and we could see a dramatic drop in the price of digital projection systems due to the simplification of hardware design thanks to the Thunderbolt connections.
 
CFreymarc said:
In the meantime ... http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp
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...according to your link:

In general interoperability with Windows is more straightforward than interoperability with MacOS. The MacOS driver for the PCIe card must be modified/updated to be ‘Thunderbolt Aware’. No changes to drivers are required for support under Windows.
...
There is an interoperability issue with MacOS using graphics (GPU) cards externally through Thunderbolt. Unfortunately, external graphics solutions for MacOS X do not work and we do not expect a resolution from Apple in the short term.
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It looks like "the world's most advanced OS" needs some work to match the world's most popular OS.... ;)
 
Wiz329 on post #39 explained it better than most(not that other ideas are not worth mentioning). OK, so if people like USB3, use it now as it is available. But when TB makes its debut for the PC world, people will like it better. TB, as explained in post #39, is more than just a connector type.
I can even fathom in a few short months there would be an external video device that games can just plug into TB port on Mac Mini or iMac OR PC boxes to experience the best video performance without having to beef up all internal components of a box to the point of absurdity, such as 1200W PS and water cooling. Better yet, future work stations may be running on some multiples of ARM processor, complete with several aggregated TB ports. This would be a dream of a low-powered super computer.
 
Thunderbolt Is To USB As A Jet Plane Is To A Horse & Buggy

USB is fine for what it does - connect printers and mice and the occasional small thumb drive. But it kinda sucks for connecting hard drives - especially the latest generation of solid state drives - and it can't really be used to connect monitors.

Thunderbolt could of course do all of that, but the real application for TB is going to be replacing the myriad docking port schemes on various laptops with a single common interface. That'll mean the next generation of laptops will be able to take advantage of the same hardware desktops utilize - high end graphics cards and the like, stuff that you just can't reasonably cram into today's laptops.

It would allow you to convert a Macbook Air or Air-like PC into pretty much a monster desktop system, just by plugging it into an expansion box when you get home.

Might also change the way desktop PCs are made. No need to have a box much bigger than a Mac Mini. If you happen to want a bunch of expansion bays, gigs of memory or powerful external graphics cards, buy a separate external box (or boxes) to house such components as-needed.

We saw the same sort of evolution happen to stereo systems back in the '60s and '70s. They started out as big clunky all-in-one console units in the '40s and '50s, with built in speakers, amps, turntables, 8-tracks, the works. Component systems took over in the '70s, allowing users to configure the systems as they saw fit. Thunderbolt will make a similar transition possible with PCs.
 
best part is all thunderbolt devices are 100GB/S capable right now, all Intel said you'll need to do is upgrade the cable your using from copper to fiber :) I for one am glad Intel went w/ encoder/decoder on the actual cable connectors and not in the chipsets used in the computers.
 
wiz329 said:
Right, but how would you like to cut your backup from "UNDER 1 hour" to just a couple of minutes? USB 3.0 offers a theoretical maximum of 5 Gb/s. Meanwhile, TB offers 10 Gb/s bi-directionally. Not only that, but by 2018-2020, it will have expanded up to its 100 Gb/s potential. Who wants to use a technology that's 20 times slower?

In the technology world, its a mistake to say that something is "fast enough". Who was it, Bill Gates that said no computer would ever need more than 32KB of memory?

We always find more applications for faster hardware.

Also, TB is about a lot more than data transfer to external drives. Apple's implementation of the display shows some of its true potential. TB is pretty much PCIe externalized - instead of having a 2-3 inch wide connector, its less than a cm. Very useful.

TB may be like FW in that it is faster than the competition, but it offers much more potential. It will definitely be used by more than 1% of consumers. Guarantee it.
Click to expand...

This is the kind of comment I'm sick of. What storage, exactly, is going to be able to write at 10GB/s, and why, exactly, is bi-directionality supposed to be impressive in the context of writing to storage? I also recall the exact same comments being made about the promised Firewire speed increases, not all of which occurred (where's FW1600?), and comprehensively failed to unseat USB 2.0. How it going to be different this time around? TBolt will be a nice connector to have for a few specific tasks where price is unimportant and will be unused by the vast majority.
 
Will Intel use the original Light Peak what Sony uses ( USB interface ). Or will all computers now come with a mini-display port? ( what Apple uses )

It would be better to use the USB interface it originally had, because then the port can also be used as a USB 3.0 port, just like Sony does.
 
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