I think you've got it wrong. As I understand it, Lightpeak was its name while it was being developed. Thunderbolt is the name they came up with to market it.
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Thunderbolt Details Emerge: Bus Power, Mini DisplayPort, and More
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I think you've got it wrong. As I understand it, Lightpeak was its name while it was being developed. Thunderbolt is the name they came up with to market it.
I've read that Intel plans on having this baked into their chipsets along with USB, etc in a year. Once that happens it'll hit mainstream.Well according to Intel its Apple exclusive until late 2012 anyway, Thunderbolt that is, lightpeak is the other one that carries no power and looks like a usb connector. I sincerely hope the exclusivity thing wasnt Apple's idea...if so its a poor choice.
If I had to bet on it, I would guess is that this one will be DOA in the PC world. Its nice and all but if PC peripherals like external drives aren't going to be showing up for over a year it just means overpriced stuff from very few vendors for mac users.According to intel it cant be added to a machine via an card or anything and has to be built into the mainboard since it needs direct access to both the video and pci express architecture.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...derbolt_as_exclusive_to_apple_until_2012.html
That's correct. Light Peak is the codename. Thunderbolt is the public release (Intel and Apple). Too bad too because the codename was much better. What the heck is a Thunderbolt anyway?
Obviously, as a techy I want one. But I have to wonder, is anyone put 0.001% of the computing population going to be able to take advantage of this?
I'm just thinking that a 7200RPM drive can read data at about 1Gbps. So what's the point of 10Gbps?
Yes, I know 10Gbps is theoretical, but so is a HD read speed. So who is going to daisy chain ten hard drives to their laptop and max the buffer read speed on all ten drives?! I suppose it'll be good for the future. It just feels like we're getting into the "mhz myth" of transfer speeds, at least to my uneducated brain. Educate me?
Also, I'm aware that SSDs can read faster, but not by that much. And we're back to what percentage of the population is daisy chaining SSDs
And while I realize that this port can handle more than just Hard drives, it seems that as a consumer all that saves me is having to plug more things in.
Not trying to be a kill joy, I just don't understand
It's not about just one drive, it's about one port (to rule them all). That one port (with daisy chaining/hubs/etc.) can send your video and audio to your TV/monitor setup, streaming HD off an external drive while backing up your data to another external drive and just generally combining it all into one fast bundle of mixed data an video streams.
As a video editor, I drool. As a gadget geek I...uh...drool.
No, the heading says exclusive, in the body it just says Apple has a year head start. There is no exclusive period.
And no lightpeak doesn't look like USB, Intel was just using the USB connector for demo. going forward it will most definitely be using the mini displayport connector.
Think of it this way. Powered Copper TB can be used for devices and charging (more power then USB). iPods, iPhones, iPads, Keyboards, Mice, audio, etc.
Optical can be a separate bus (seperate port), providing 10Gb and beyond.
Remember, this is the 1.0 version, Intel said it will scale nicely once the fiber versions ship, up to and beyond 100GB using the same connector. If you only have one drive hooked up to your machine, you really shouldn't care about this. If you use your machine, this is awesome. I would love to replace the 7 ports and different cables (FW800,FW400,USB,eSATA,GigE Networking, Fibre Channel, DVI) with a single jack that can pipe all this and more through it. For editing I have 10 hard drives in 2 RAIDS on 2 Port Multipliers to a PCIe eSATA card... How about 1 case that fits it all and a single external optical cable back to my mac? Then another cable that goes from the raid to my display. My display has some USB ports for legacy devices (all piped back to the mac over TB). Then the TB cable continues on to a breakout box with fibre channel and 10gigE, and maybe a firewire port for legacy devices. All this could be pumped over a single 100gig fiber TB cable.
At my house, it might be overkill, but at work this is awesome. Regardless of what you will use it for, the promise of a single cable that can carry nearly any protocol over it is amazing. One cable to rule them all!
Optical can be a separate bus (seperate port), providing 10Gb and beyond.
Remember, this is the 1.0 version, Intel said it will scale nicely once the fiber versions ship, up to and beyond 100GB using the same connector. If you only have one drive hooked up to your machine, you really shouldn't care about this. If you use your machine, this is awesome. I would love to replace the 7 ports and different cables (FW800,FW400,USB,eSATA,GigE Networking, Fibre Channel, DVI) with a single jack that can pipe all this and more through it. For editing I have 10 hard drives in 2 RAIDS on 2 Port Multipliers to a PCIe eSATA card... How about 1 case that fits it all and a single external optical cable back to my mac? Then another cable that goes from the raid to my display. My display has some USB ports for legacy devices (all piped back to the mac over TB). Then the TB cable continues on to a breakout box with fibre channel and 10gigE, and maybe a firewire port for legacy devices. All this could be pumped over a single 100gig fiber TB cable.
At my house, it might be overkill, but at work this is awesome. Regardless of what you will use it for, the promise of a single cable that can carry nearly any protocol over it is amazing. One cable to rule them all!
haha! 2cleva
interesting for me is that it all is still through copper............... very interesting
edit- looking at the connector, there seems to be quite a bit of space in the inner protruding "blank" bit for a later addition of optic fiber for faster data transfer............ hopefully apple/intel/the rest will accept this as a "standard"
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My initial Time Machine backup or clone would take all of 2.5 minutes max. That is freaking awesome.
Intel is saying 10Gbps isn't theoretical but the actual speed you'll get. Of course, we won't know if that's really true or not until tests can be performed and it depends on the quality of the chipset.
Also, you'd be able to drive 3 1080p displays at 60fps but you'd be almost topping out 10Gbps so 2 would be recommended.
There's a really great discussion going on at Ars Technica with people crunching the numbers and such.
Basically, someone said that you'd be able to connect your display to your Mac and then plug everything else into your display. Then you'd be able to come in and plug in one cable + power (until Apple combines the two [they've already got a patent on that]) and have everything connected. It's brilliant if you have a setup like that.
That's what I've been thinking. I don't know where the "exclusive" talk came from, or if there's anything supporting it. It wouldn't make any sense to try to push a new standard but not give everyone access to it for a full year.
And it sucks. A USB docking station is a bad idea. First of all it delivers images to 1 or 2 screen whilst bypassing your build-in graphics card. It requires 3rd party drivers to support the display link protocol which in some cases can lead to kernel panics. Trust me I've seen it happen. And last but not least, the USB protocol uses the processor to regulate all the traffic. Meaning the more traffic the slower your computer and the shorter your battery life. Which leads me to my next point how is my previous point taken care of in TB? ala USB or FireWire?
Yep, people are getting it WRONG for the following reasons:
1 - Thunderbolt IS Light Peak;
2 - It's easier for USB 3.0 to die than Thunderbolt - why? Because Intel is behind it. So unless you're a hobbyist assembling PCs with niche parts, Thunderbolt IS the way to go for the whole desktop/laptop industry;
3 - Thunderbolt already has DOUBLE the bandwidth of USB 3.0 - so no, the Betamax here will NOT be Thunderbolt;
4 - I passed today by a major Swiss electronics retailer - not a single USB 3.0 device was available, apart from an external HD that is "ready" for a USB 3.0 upgrade...so there you go;
5 - Apple does NOT have exclusivity, it has a head start. Why? Because Intel chipsets won't include TB natively until 2012.
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TB is more like 3x faster than USB 3.0, since USB 3.0 has high overhead that caps its speed at ~3.2 Gbps. TB has very very low overhead.
actually some comments are actually spot on regarding mini-displayport's future:
why bother with having mini displayport anyway ?
how many screens actually have mini-displayport and don't need an adapter ? why not go for thunderbolt for the next appledisplay and replace the minidisplayport with a second TB port since you need for other screens an adapter anyway
why bother with having mini displayport anyway ?
how many screens actually have mini-displayport and don't need an adapter ? why not go for thunderbolt for the next appledisplay and replace the minidisplayport with a second TB port since you need for other screens an adapter anyway
I don't think you get it. Thunderbolt and Mini DisplayPort are the same thing, now. Essentially, at least. The port is both. You can plug either or both into the same port, even at the same time (obviously not two connectors into the same port on the computer, but via daisy chaining).
jW
2: Intel is also "commited" to USB 3.0. I guess they stalled as long as they could, but they will also support it natively "in the future". Apart from Apple its not stopping any major PC Maker from implementing it anyways to my knowledge - but it will obviously make it cheaper if its natively on the chipset
4: I'd be interested to know which retailer that was, because all the big ones like Media Markt, Saturn, Interdiscount etc. carry several external USB 3.0 Hds.
My problem with the current implementation of Thunderbolt is that I fail to see how it can deliver an image signal to an high res. DisplayPort screen and still offer fast transfer speed in the same direction. Notice that in the demo the data transfer was not the same way as the image data. The thing is that Display Port 1.2 actually has 17.2 Gbits of Bandwith, compared to the 10 Gbits of Thunderbolt - So that makes me question the usefulness of the current implementation (especially considering higher resolution Screens in the future).
To answer my own question with a quote from Ars Technica reporting on what Intel had said
checking with my favourite online store
funny how the majority of intel chipset motherboards for sandy-bridge desktops (for preorder) support USB 3.0
intel: 11 out of 15
Asus: 14 out of 14
gigabyte: 7 out of 9
MSI: 12 out of 15
so 44 out of 53 at one store (all intel chipset equipped mind you)
so currently that's 83% of the new 1155pin sandybridge motherboards feature USB 3.0 ...
and i counted 32 different external harddisks supporting USB 3.0
if it hadn't been for the stupid sandy bridge sata bug then there would be multiple hundred thousands motherboards already delivered