EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: ptricks on December 26, 2012, 12:21:58 am
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Reading more about the Intel thunderbolt technology, and have followed the development of it since it was called light pipe last year. This seems like it could be the holy grail of cables. One cable that can do data, 10 Watts of power and carry video, or anything else if needed. I can't imagine the day when a pc could have one kind of port where anything you have works in that port, without adapter, a and b style cables, cat 5 or cat 6, dvi or HDMI. Eventually intel is considering pushing it to the consumer market for things like tv and player interconnect, so it could be the one cable to rule them all.
The main downside I see is cost, but that will decrease just like all tech. I also want to see what methods of interface will be available for lower end engineers that don't do 10,000 quantity parts orders.
Promise is shipping an external drive soon that uses the connection, 750MB/sec, that is megabyte not bits, basically a blank 74 minute cd every second, using an SSD drive or 480MB/sec with platter based drives. Dual channels can also be used for 1.5GB/sec. After transferring several hundred GB this week to a friends external drive, I welcome its arrival.
some of the intel highlights:
https://thunderbolttechnology.net/ (https://thunderbolttechnology.net/)
Dual-channel 10Gbps per port
Thunderbolt port on a computer is capable of providing the full bandwidth of the link in both directions with no sharing of band- width between ports or between upstream and downstream directions.
Thunderbolt cables may be electrical or optical; both use the same Thunderbolt connector. An active electrical-only cable provides for connections of up to 3 meters in length, and provides for up to 10W of power deliverable to a bus-powered device. And an active optical cable provides for much greater lengths; tens of meters.
A high-performance, low-power, switching architecture.
A highly efficient, low-overhead packet format with flexible QoS support that allows multiplexing of bursty PCI Express transactions with isochronous DisplayPort communication on the same link.
A symmetric architecture that supports flexible topologies (star, tree, daisy chaining, etc.) and enables peer-to-peer communication (via software) between devices.
A novel time synchronization protocol that allows all the Thunderbolt products connected in a domain to synchronize their time within 8ns of each other.
Wondering what others think ?
http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?region=en-US&m=574&rsn1=40&rsn3=62 (http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?region=en-US&m=574&rsn1=40&rsn3=62)
2 x Thunderbolt technology ports at 10 Gb/s (1.25GB/s)
Supports RAID 0, 1 and JBOD
Supports 2.5” SATA SSD and HDD
Delivers over 750MB/s with SSDs (Up to 480MB/s with 7200 rpm HDDs)
Capacity
J4 Enclosure Only – 0TB (*)
J4 Enclosure (4 x 500GB HDD (5400 rpm)) – 2TB of raw capacity
Supports Time Machine in Mac OS X
Supports daisy chaining up to 6 Thunderbolt technology-compatible devices
Durable, lightweight aluminum enclosure
J4 Enclosure: 1.6 Kg
J4 Enclosure with HDDs: 2.4 Kg
2 year warranty (warranty only covers the components that PROMISE ships)
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active cables in the current generation is pretty stupid imho.
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What's missing are PCIe cards to add Thunderbolt to an existing PC. Not very many are willing to replace a recent PC just to get Thunderbolt, even if Thunderbolt devices become cheaper. Contrast that with interfaces like USB 3 and (e)SATA and while they might not be quite as fast, both upgrade cards and devices are cheap and commonly available.
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I think Thunderbolt had very bad start. USB 3 is there and it's everywhere. Cheap devices are common. Outside Apple world it is very likely the standard will disappear.
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I think Thunderbolt had very bad start. USB 3 is there and it's everywhere. Cheap devices are common. Outside Apple world it is very likely the standard will disappear.
It also looks like Thunderbolt is proprietary and the specs are not freely available. I agree that USB3 is going to dominate, just like USB2 vs IEEE1394; while the latter was technically superior in many ways it was not as open as USB, and so manufacturers went with the former.