First Look: Inside Apple's fast new Thunderbolt port on MacBook Pros - Page 2

As usual, it's more complex than that. Intel had said that they would put FW on their Mobo's, but both Apple and TI were asking for $0.25 per port at first, and that's why we got USB 2. But Sony used FW on most of their machines, and other manufacturers used it on some. For years, every camcorder had it as standard, and a number of high end digital cameras did, and still do use it. Its standard in the professional music industry. Even the military uses it. It's not just an Apple thing.

10 watts is not bad at all.

Why not order directly?

I've seen it alluded to, but not out-right stated, that this is a peer-to-peer technology. Or is it master-slave like USB? The peer-to-peer aspects of FW were seldom used, but Migration Assistant is one example. That's one thing people always pointed to when they feared the loss of Firewire. And if it's peer-to-peer, and also supports networking protocols like ethernet, could I daisy-chain Mac-HD-Mac and allow both Macs to access the hard drive at the same time?



I think the "one (or two)" will depend on your video card. Thunderbolt (can we just say TB so I don't have to type it out everytime?) only passes the data. Throughput-wise it could probably handle more displays, but you still need a video card that can generate the data in the first place.

And I don't think you'd need a display that supports daisy-chaining. You'd only need a DisplayPort adaptor that support it. The adaptors would be daisy-chained and an individual display would hang off each adaptor. They wouldn't even know they were on a TB bus.

Of couse, they will eventually be displays that have a direct TB connection and also provide FW/USB ports on the display, all using the TB connection back to the computer.



I think they will still include one USB port. There are just too many devices out there. You don't want someone to carry around an adaptor on the off-chance someone will hand them a flash drive they need to copy files off of. Speaking of which, will TB ever be cheap enough to allow it's use in inexpensive flash drives? I suspect the USB port will be around for some time to come.

Hey, FW800 might be more expensive that USB 2 but I am very glad we had FW800 for all those years before USB 3 actually appeared. And if you add the price for a powered USB hub to the game, the premium of FW800 was not quite as high.

FW800 was not bad but it hardly caught on outside Apple and Apple dumped it like a hot potato(e).

I hope PC manufacturers are going to adopt this as a standard as well, only then will it become standard.

So now Apple can make their displays to serve also as dock stations. You come back home and connect your MBA or MBP to the big screen. All other stuff is already connected to your display, so you have to stick only 1 cable into your portable device. Clever. Oh, they even can make displays with hard drives and DVD/CD :-)

Was that before or after he sent Hitler his annual $50k birthday present?

The one thing that gives me envy of the new 17-inch over my late 2009 17-inch is the placement of the Thunderbolt port. The DisplayPort port is forward of the USB ports on my machine, which really annoys me.

Sad and true.

When it comes to ports, Apple seem determined to live in a possible future, but I and all my devices live in the present.

They need to consider that you can push technology on your own platform to the limit but, when interacting with the outside world, you need to stick to what people really have.

Exactly.

Well, two cables. Unless you want a dead battery in your MBP the next morning.

What Thurderbolt has going for it is that it is more than USB, more than eSata, more than just a 1 typical use type port. I don't think we'll see the USB ports or others leaving the Mac anytime soon, this has far more implications for things like Docking systems & compact laptops like the MBAir.

The one thing I don't like is the integration with display, that will mean that if I want to connect a display adapter I might have to unplug a disk to hook up an extra monitor, unless they require that all devices must include a display passthrough port.

Looking forward to new Cinema Displays with a female Thunderbolt port (or two).

Intel has said that 10 Gbps is not theoretical, but actual achievable bandwidth.

And yes, devices will always be limited by their own capabilities, but those devices will only use up the bandwidth they need, allowing others to transmit data in the remaining space.

For instance, I could have a FW800 RAID, an external display and an ethernet connection all running off the single Thunderbolt port. While they each have their own bandwidth limitations, they would all run full speed, no bottle neck.

Systems that use the new port will not get FireWire, USB, DisplayPort, etc. automatically, the hardware controllers for each still need to be there, as well as the software support in the operating system.

I don't care what PC manufacturers do or don't do.

Intel said that this is specifically designed for audio and video and I'm certain that the Pros will gravitate towards Thunderbolt, because almost all pros use Macs. Firewire survived just fine without it being found on cheap PC laptops. The average PC user using inferior gear does not need the power of Thunderbolt.

Lacie has also just announced the first Thunderbolt external drive that I am aware of.

This is the best article so far about this, from Ars Technica. It explains most of what's being asked here.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...throughput.ars

You're thinking too small. Who says you'll only have one disk connected to your port? The bandwidth of Thunderbolt is supposed to be larger than that required by your devices so that you can put multiple devices of multiple types onto that one port.

As I posted earlier, there are four or five companies that have announced RAID TB products. This will move quickly.

Looks like this is not going to happen. Just read from the Intel's presentation:
DisplayPort devices must be the last device in chain.

Boy, did that Magsafe connector patent send a bunch of us down a rat hole. Lots of spilled electrons in the last few days posting about how LightPeak would work with a magnetic connector! But it was fun.

It seems that products will have a passthrough connector. I haven't read anything about a need for it to be display adapter specific, though the cable end would need to be if the monitor doesn't have a TB connector itself.

Nope, they'll keep plugging the monitor cable in and call Apple asking why their computer won't charge.

Currently, there aren't enough hubs or adapters or even peripherals out there to allow for the removal of those other ports. However, I'm sure there will many breakout boxes (port hubs) to allow multiple connections to the single port. This is necessary to have backward compatibility. Eventually, for Macs, we may see hubs with USB, FireWire, Ethernet, DisplayPort ports to allow the connection of legacy peripherals. At that time Apple may choose to replace all ports with one, two or three Thunderbolt ports.

While they may not ever require that peripheral makers include a pass-thru port, in the past FireWire devices have usually shipped with them for daisy-chaining peripherals.

It doesn't have more going for it. New motherboards are typically shipping with 6-8 USB 2.0 ports and 2 USB 3.0 ports (both on the back). Almost every USB port people are using is USB 2.0. Without Intel support (which Thunderbolt has), it has nothing going for it.

PS: When you buy a new peripheral it comes with the cable and you plug it into the port that fits. Most consumers don't buy cables.


Isn't it odd that there's an iPad announcement next week? Peripherals are coming, don't you worry. Apple is just getting their time in the sun today because they helped develop the technology.

That PC I have sitting in the corner has been enjoying USB 3 for about a year now. Where have the Macs been all this time?

The "average PC user" needs thunderbolt and USB 3.0 about as much as the "average Mac user," in that they just need a place to plug in their keyboards and iPods. That's it. Any professional that understands the benefits of IDEE 1394 and has a reason to use it already does. You can add Firewire 800 to just about any PC on the market for about $30.

So kindly step down from your Mac high horse, thanks ^_^. Besides, I'm more concerned about the licensing involved to implement it into chipsets. Since its based on PCI Express and displayport, does that mean AMD can add their own implementation of Thunderbolt in their chipsets going forward? I don't want to be forced to buy an add-in card for any AMD-based system I build in the future.

I mentioned this earlier, but they won't get far when they realize it doesn't fit.

The Intel + Apple combination can be sufficient to push this:

1) Intel makes it all really cheap, by providing the controllers in their chipsets itself.
2) Apple can push it by
(a) bringing it to the market. Apple commanding the majority of the premium market (where peripheral sales are likely to be reasonably high) means that a lot of peripheral makers are going to target this. Consider a scenario where Seagate is selling only USB3 drives, but Western Digital has a TB drive which has twice the transfer speed. What is a mac user going to buy as his Time Machine backup?
(b) Apple can really push this by inclusion in the iPad/iPod. Once TB is supported throughout the entire line of Apple products, Dell will have a scenario where they have to either support TB, or Mac users can sync their iPhones, iPads and iPods 10 times faster than Dell users.

It remains to be seen if either company is going to push this much, but if they decide to, assuming its technically solid (which it absolutely appears to be), its can easily be very successful.

That much is for certain. I had to assist a professor yesterday because she couldn't get her laptop to appear on the projection screen. I noticed right away that she hadn't connected the VGA cable to her laptop. Doh!

Really? I still see a FW800 port on all the new MBPs.

Its better this way! Rather than create a proprietary connector, Intel is utilizing the existing Mini-DisplayPort connector that Apple released a few years ago that can be used royalty-free. I think that's the key that will make this standard work - its open, its familiar, its backwards compatible, and literally anyone can implement it.

Smart, smart move, Apple and Intel.

Surely you have missed this? Or are you speaking of daisy-chaining only between multiple displays?

"Thunderbolt technology is based on a switched fabric architecture with full-duplex links. Unlike bus-based I/O architectures, each 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. The Thunderbolt protocol architecture can be abstracted into four layers as shown in Figure 2." (http://www.intel.com/technology/io/t...US_secured.pdf)

I wonder if it supports closed loops like 1394b. It is certainly useful if you need to remove nodes on the chain.

In any case I assume that this is basically external PCI-e.


That's true. I believe AMDs technical brief for the 6000-series suggested that there would be DisplayPort "splitters" as a stopgap measure. I have not bothered to look for any though. Anyway, the 10 Gbit bandwidth for DisplayPort provided by Thunderbolt is still less than the 17.3 Gbit provided by DisplayPort 1.2, which is unfortunate since it is not enough for two 2560x1600/1440@60 Hz displays.

Picture this:

Mac -> hub -> Cinema Display

Now tape the the hub to the back of the Cinema Display and what do you have? Apple could do that internally on the display.

New Cinema Displays wouldn't be DisplayPort devices, but rather Thunderbolt devices, so there's no worry about that restriction.

I'm glad that Mac users haven't been enjoying USB 3.0 for the past year, because Apple was smart and decided to move straight to Thunderbolt instead, which is superior to USB 3.0. Anyway, what's out for USB 3.0 anyway? It doesn't look like it's caught on exactly. I've always been skeptical of USB and even firewire 1 is better than USB 2.0 when it comes to real world usage. Good riddance to USB is what I say.



But I like the view from up here.

Otherwise known as an iMac. What could be done with a 27" iMac and a MBP joined together via TB? Or an iPad/iPod/iPhone and a display like you propose? An iPod connected to a peripheral packed display would be a not too bad personal computer.

I'm glad to see other people grasping the potential rather than just spouting "OMG!! USB 3.0 FTW!"

- Jasen.

Looking at the ports on my unibody aluminum 13" Macbook: Never noticed that it's exactly as thick as the Ethernet port. The top casing is incredibly thin above that port.

So you'd have to think the 2012 Macbook refresh will kill ethernet ports across the board - if it's the major update alluded to earlier in the week.

I'm surprised that DisplayPort / Thunderdome is as tall as it is. Pretty much the same as USB. Is there some reason for computers to always have A-type USB ports instead of micro or mini?

I just saw the Intel live presentation. They had a few storage devices from LeCie that were TB capable. In the demo they hit the drive's max throughput (6Gbs) without even breaking a sweat.

Western Digital has signed on along with many pro audio device manufactures. I suspect it is cheap enough that you will see a flood of devices on the market in a 6 months to a year. Believe it or not this answers the prayers of many PC manufacturers that have been playing musical chairs with ports and I/O protocols in an attempt to make everybody happy and not get killed on per port licensing fees.

I get the bandwidth thing, and with the intention to log all those peripherals on one bus, I reckon that's a good thing, but as to addressable speed, are there any disk/storage type devices that can "get up to speed" so to speak? SSDs have the capability but their controllers are for now limited in speed. Striped disk arrays (RAID 0) can also increase their throughput and boost speed, but both FW800 (with SATA drives) and eSATA are much slower than 10Gbps, so I'm still wondering where our improved performance (where the computer rubber hits the road) might come from? In other words, where are the new drive controllers that can boost the SSD or RAID 0 storage to this new capability? And what are they going to cost? Native Firewire drives never took off because of the expense of the controller.



No, I understand one port to rule them all, as I stated earlier. I also currently have multiple machines using multiple external Firewire hard drives, that are SATA based with SATA/FW bridge boards. If Intel and whoever don't have cheap controllers that scale the devices up to those speeds (The announcement mentions copying an HD movie in 30 seconds) then just like using a SATA/FW bridgeboard is the current implementation for external FW drives versus a native FW controller, we will have this neat speed thing, but limited access to it. So, while I am not predicting FAIL, I am wondering about where the speed is going to come from.

I checked LaCie's website, and they are not mentioning price (that I could see) but their drive appears to be SSD only, so that's part of it, but they didn't have much more information except that was really fast