Ten things to know about Intel's Thunderbolt

2/24/2011 5:11 PM EST

Rick, was there any mention of DRM support on Thunderbolt? My understanding was that this was one of the nails in 1394's coffin as far as being a video interface. If this is just a computer interface the content companies may not care, but if it also is a video link to CE devices that will probably come up as an issue.

Larry M.

2/24/2011 7:01 PM EST

It supports DisplayPort which supports HDCP, but I am not sure if there is any native copy protection technology on T'bolt

2/24/2011 7:04 PM EST

In the short term it means obscene profits for Apple (or at minimum, premium pricing for consumers) until other devices reach commodity levels.

2/24/2011 11:52 PM EST

I guess they changed the name from Lightpeak to Thunderbolt since optical link is years away! It doesn't sound like it will be compatible with USB at all, but seems to be built on PCIE. Will PCIE have a separate roadmap? Or does it mean there will be no PCIE and all interconnect on-board will be Thunderbolt?

2/25/2011 11:13 AM EST

This sounds great!! Time to upgrade my MacBook. I have been shopping around for the best home wireless storage solutions, this seems to be the best option so far.

2/25/2011 3:22 PM EST

I like the performance numbers but am leery of yet another new "standard" interface solution. I hope that they can bring it to the market, if for no other reason than to start the competition in the high-speed connected devices. Time and the market will tell the story, will it be Beta or VHS? The question was purposeful as both have gone the way of the dinosaur in a few years.

2/25/2011 6:05 PM EST

As soon as Thunderbolt specifications are available, it will be quickly followd by USB 2.0 to Thunderbolt bridge ICs.

2/25/2011 6:11 PM EST

@BalaLak: No word on USB over Thunderbolt yet. PCIe roadmap remains separate. Turns out Intel is promising an active optical cable for Thunderbolt later this year.

2/25/2011 8:09 PM EST

USB is so widely adapted. Thunderbolt will take years to replace if it ever happens. However, it would be very interesting to see a device having various interfaces which include thunderbolt and USB - A thunderbolt to USB bridge.

2/25/2011 9:48 PM EST

"OEMs told us that until vendors can reduce the cost of optics significantly they have difficulties adopting that technology," Yogev said. "

can someone clarify the logic of this statement to delay real fibre for the home massive markets today please ?

as far as i know looking at the old video content, Intel already had cheap working fibre optics inside the prototype controller upto 100 meters or more.

2/26/2011 4:12 AM EST

I was delighted to see the final iteration of Thunderbolt (a *much* better name than "LightPeak") and it's reuse of PCI-E and DisplayPort (particularly the repurposing of the mini-DP connector). The competing multi-gigabit I/O interfaces all have major problems ... and USB 3 is the worst of the lot, since it also takes some of the good things about PCI-E (the serdes interface and coding), but then degrades the capabilities in the name of backwards compatibility with a backwards architecture. Sorry, but every time I had to work with the USB architecture (which was frequently), I had to hold my nose. *Implementations* of USB, on the other hand, were sometimes truely useful, but those were the ones that best hid the embarassing underpinings.

RE avoiding the Firewire problems ... that should be fairly simple: 1) Intel gets to put it into the chipsets, making it "free" to designers, 2) it has two very visable and market-oriented backers with very different business models, and 3) there appear to be far fewer licensing issues ... Intel has always been very good about licensing interface IP and encouraging the formation of licensing and interopability groups.

2/26/2011 7:49 AM EST

Intel has been pushing technology all year long. With Thunderbolt, it hopes to push AMD out of this business. Poor AMD, they have not chance in the near future to catch up.

2/26/2011 10:33 AM EST

Is Apply really take big risk willing to pioneer adopting this technology ?

2/26/2011 1:24 PM EST

It does seem like USB and Firewire are due for an exit. Perhaps a new standard is just the push they need to get off the stage...

2/26/2011 5:11 PM EST

Apple is known for giving new technologies a real survival chance. It has been the first company to outdate the floppy disk and no one uses the drivers any more. I still have to read more about thunderbolt technology but it sounds quite an exciting technology. Although i doubt that it will replace the USB soon. Also, any technology gets push only when more and more players adopt the standard and create an infrastructure around it.

2/27/2011 2:52 AM EST

Is this Thunderbolt technology licensed to Apple only? What about the Windows PCs? Is Thunderbolt a serial bus standard ? are the chip sets for this interface already shipping from Intel?

2/27/2011 5:11 PM EST

Wow what a name Thunderbolt. It sure will be. With the amount of data we normally copy these days, I guess we need this interconnect very much. This is exactly why Intel is a leader and doesnot have tough competition from any one company. Intel and Apple combinatin would be really strong.

2/28/2011 9:49 AM EST

It looks like Intel learned a few things about marketing serial technologies. Firewire was never incorporated into it's chipsets so it never became a commodity technology. The licensing pool for Firewire was not nearly as effective as USB; it had to be called 1394 for a long time because Apple wouldn't release the name "Firewire" for many years.

The implication from the statements that Thunderbolt implements PCIe as a protocol, indicates that it's a substantially different serial transport than Firewire or USB. Software will easily be an order of magnitude more complex.

Microsoft has made great strides with driver support in general but supporting bus drivers is well beyond the demonstrated capabilities of OEMs or ODMs. Linux will be challenged by this without strong direction by Intel. Of course, Apple will do what ever it wants and it will work.

Best on the record for USB/Firewire adoption, it's easily 3 years before Thunderbolt really starts to impact the market and 5+ before it dominates.

2/28/2011 4:00 PM EST

" thin notebooks or clients can use Thunderbolt to link to high-end drives, displays and other external devices instead of building them all into one box. Essentially, it provides a PCI Express link outside the box "

So is this the missing link for cloud computing where apple didnt show up? Can we assume apple is having plans to build its cloud Os based on T.bolt interconnection?

2/28/2011 4:03 PM EST

Rick,
This is a horrible format for an article. 10 mouse clicks and page reloading to read one page worth of material? What's the reasoning behind this?

2/28/2011 11:42 PM EST

@rick.merritt: Who are the Silicon players for the Thunderbolt interconnects? I would be curious to know... in contrast, there are quite a few Si vendors for USB 3.0.

@david.may: you can get 5m reach at Gb/sec in copper TwinAx without pre-emphasis/equalizer chips at 30AWG and longer with the chips (15m possible). This configuration includes one lane for Tx, one for Rx, differential signaling.

With 10Gig Base-T, the patch cords can go much longer; with AV bridging IEEE is re-promoting, it may not be too long before we see consumer appliances offering 10Gig RJ45 ports.

MP Divakar

2/28/2011 11:52 PM EST

OOOPS, I meant 10Gb/sec in the second para above (SFP+ Copper Interconnects)!

That aside, Thunderbolt has to improve on the mechanical dimension challenges of the USB-3.0 while not compromising on the data fidelity. The Intel website for Thunderbolt mentions that the interconnects are daisy-chainable; one would have to use retimers for this.

One of the biggest things going for Thunderbolt would be the compatibility with Displayport which opens up a huge market in signage.

MP Divakar

3/1/2011 10:26 AM EST

Can the systems work at this speed?Will we able to feel the speed when we interconnect through thunderbolt?!!!

3/2/2011 4:23 PM EST

I think it is a very promising technology.

But also I think it is a variation of the split-chassis concept from times when PCI express was introduced. PCI express also can natively communicate through cables. There were some concepts, ASUS made a prototype of an external graphic card (if I remember correctly, Fujitsu-Siemens had a product like that), but...

Although this “version 2” looks more appealing to me - more application scenarios, and it is using smaller connectors.

Here is some page about the old concept: http://focus.ti.com/lit/ml/sllt193a/sllt193a.pdf

USB at the moment is not leaving us because the Thunderbolt is much more complex, probably more demanding and more expensive solution. I do not see mouses, keyboards, serial port converters, mobile phones and other simple devices employing Thunderbolt in the nearest future.

3/2/2011 5:58 PM EST

Can a peripheral use a Thunderbolt host as it's power source the way that you can with USB? If yes, what is the voltage and max current rating(s)?

3/3/2011 8:37 AM EST

Maybe both Intel and Apple have to do more marketing work in order not to follow the failure of Firewire. I also think Firewire was very good at the time it was just launched but finally there just didn't have enough products and applications supporting this technology.

3/3/2011 10:13 AM EST

Is there such thing as "hub" for thunderbolt?

3/3/2011 1:13 PM EST

Whenever I think of Thunderbolt I think of a really awesome RAID array at the opposite end of my house.

3/4/2011 2:12 PM EST

Any latency figures for Thunderbolt?

3/7/2011 10:00 AM EST

I predict Thunderbolt will suffer the same fate as Firewire for the same reasons.
USB3 has much greater current momentum and backing from the industry.

Yes Thunderbolt is faster than USB3 but Firewire was also faster than USB2 but USB still won out.
Because it was cheaper to implement and backward compatible to USB1.

Eventually USB4 will be just as fast or close to Thunderbolt.

Also more and more products are sensitive to power. If Thunderbolt is a power hog, then all the more reason USB3 will prevail.

3/7/2011 12:19 PM EST

I'm

3/7/2011 12:25 PM EST

I'm surprised that PCIe hasn't officially extended beyond the enclosure before now. Back in the 3GIO days I just assumed that PCIe would naturally be used to bridge enclosures. This would open up a whole new world of system partitioning. Is Thunderbolt essentially PCIe. If not, what is the real value add? Why not use Infiniband?

3/12/2011 1:26 PM EST

Heads up: This technology is a path to get
'optical computing' (OC) and OC hardware into the next generation of computers. Utilizing the OC technology - computing can move to the x10,000 faster range ... I predict by 2012. The OC prototypes are running now in labs.

3/13/2011 1:24 AM EST

For those concerned about the use of multiple pages: I agree we who sit in front of screens so much all get tired of the finger work of clicking and the ten second page loading delays. Unfortunately one of the few ways we in publishing--who struggle to make a buck to pay our salaries these days--get rewarded in the Web era is by getting more clicks and page views. This is the price of FREE NEWS. Enjoy it while it lasts because someday there will be PAID NEWS or NO NEWS. Thus ends my rant.

3/14/2011 2:38 AM EDT

dont worry USb guys :-) usb will still be there