Thunderbolt Details Emerge: Bus Power, Mini DisplayPort, and More

[joaoferro99]

Well, I agree with you. I guess, nobody sees that this something, called TB is NOT Lightpeak. They just could not deliver on time, could not deliver on optical. Seeing this Jobs went to Ive:
"Hey, man, we have to do smtg. about this, we cannot disappont the shareholders, you better come up with something, and fast!"
"OK, chief, what's the problem?"
"We have to build LightPeak in the next generation, and Intel is nowhere..."
"Let me see what do we got... mmm DisplayPort carries 8Gigs, so we need another 2 Gigs, yes? We put a PCI-e on the DP and we have the bandwidth, nobody will ever notice that the 8G can be used only for video transmitting and nothing else and that it's only two Gigabit Ethernet ports aggregated, yes, boss?"
And so the TB came to life...

interesting...... but make good sense...
why did they choose DP port? any good reason for it? why not choose FireWire, which is universal in mac boxes.

 

[AidenShaw]

It is hot pluggable.

The cable and its PHY components being hot-pluggable doesn't imply that the OS is happy that new PCIe slots with PCIe devices suddenly appeared, and not that the OS is happy if PCIe slots (and the devices) suddenly disappeared. There's also an issue with filesystems, which may have cached "dirty" data that is lost if the drive is unplugged.

It's almost a given that a small non-locking connector won't be fried by being connected or disconnected. The question is whether the OS can deal with the PCIe bus being randomly extended or truncated as easily as it deal with losing a USB connector.

Supporting hot-plug at the physical layer is easy compared to the software support.

 

[FFTT]

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive, but today I stopped by my local
Apple Store to take a look at the port and to see how the
different screens look.

The Thunderbolt port is very small. Smaller than a phone jack, small.

This jack is So critical, that I'm treating it with due care.

Hot Swappable or not, I'm shutting down before anything goes
direct into this port.

A stray arc or static on your fingertips is like bee lined right into
the motherboard and the GPU. I'm shutting down and stress reliefing
any cable that goes into the port.

 

[johnnyturbouk]

a revodrive conncected via TB would be sick....

 

[cmaier]

A stray arc or static on your fingertips is like bee lined right into
the motherboard and the GPU.

Um. Huh?