Opitical Thunderbolt cables. On a Thinkpad.

[Gary Huff]

You mean you don’t see the elegance in daisy chaining a ton a devices together?

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Maybe I’m being naive, but isn’t Thunderbolt going to change computing/peripherals?”

It changes a lot for small form factor computers (which happen to be massively popular). I don’t see it being a step forward for towers though. PCIe slots are still capable of far more bandwidth. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t put Thunderbolt on a tower, you still want to be able to use the same peripherals across all classes of computer. But Thunderbolt is not a replacement for PCIe. It is a wonderful leap beyond FireWire, USB, eSATA, and ExpressCard.

From my distant Internet vantage point, it looks like there is a lot of Thunderbolt at NAB this year.

Best,
Andy

[Herb Sevush]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Maybe I’m being naive, but isn’t Thunderbolt going to change computing/peripherals?”

AS for me, if I could undo my purchases of the last year which included a new high speed raid and an external LTO5 drive, I would be all over the ProMaxx One PC workstation, which has an internal 6 disk hardware raid, an internal LTO5 drive and 4 boot drives that can be swapped out externally. This would put everything I need in 1 box with 1 power supply and 1 set of fans. Brillinat idea and the exact opposite of the daisy chained jumbled cable Tbolt future you apparently long for.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Darren Durbin] “This is the exact reason I prefer having individual devices. If anything is going to fail, it’s nearly always a PSU.”

If either my raid or my workstation is down I’m not working, so I see no advantage in having them powered separately. With everything in 1 unit you can keep 1 backup PSU on hand instead of 2.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Joseph W. bourke]

Could this be a problem? Devices are beginning to proliferate, but apparently not the cables. And, of course, since the cables are currently going for about 50 bucks, guess what’s not included with many of the devices?

https://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/backroom-only-for-thunderbolt-cables/12665

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Joseph W. bourke]

Apparently the blazing speed of Thunderbolt is achieved through the use of Gennum transceiver chips, which essentially means there’s a mini-computer on each end of the cable. And since the specs on the chip haven’t been released, the cables will only be available through Apple:

https://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/why-apples-2m-thunderbolt-cable-costs-a-whopping-50.ars

This could be the harbinger of some of the same problems inherent with Firewire as it began to be adopted. Many manufacturers went with USB, since there was no licensing needed from Apple.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Andrew Richards]

There are cables appearing from other OEMs now.

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Herb Sevush] “Brillinat idea and the exact opposite of the daisy chained jumbled cable Tbolt future you apparently long for.”

That awesome if you can buy one machine with everything in it. It’s just not the way we operate.

The most exciting thing about the article I linked to is the extension.

We already have a jumbled cabled mess, and Thunderbolt will actually clean that up a bit.

We have 5 computers connected to a SAN and two of those are extended (Keyboard, DVI x2, mouse, Kona SDI/audio, ethernet x2, computer audio for each machine) with fibre linking to the SAN where the computers, video/audio patch panel, LTO, KiPro, VTR. The other 3 computers are linked via ethernet to the SAN. Thunderbolt can take up a lot of this mess, and allow us to attached the laptops and iMac to the SAN at a faster rate than 1GB ethernet. Since Thunderbolt will be optical, it will allow for longer cable runs. We can then have the ATTO Thunderbolt to Fibre hookups right in the noisy CPU room. And we won’t need a monster MacPro to do this. We operate with mobility today (and with MacPro power too). What I thought most intriguing about Smoke was that they are actually developing for this type of future on OSX, and that’s what interests me. I know it doesn’t interest you.

So, if I can attach CPUs with one cable fairly easy to our existing system that allows greater performance than before, then yes, I guess I “long” for that. Am I wrong to think that this might be cool?

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Andrew Richards] “It changes a lot for small form factor computers (which happen to be massively popular). I don’t see it being a step forward for towers though. PCIe slots are still capable of far more bandwidth”

Today. Today, you are right. How much bandwidth do we need realistically?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Joseph W. Bourke] “Could this be a problem? Devices are beginning to proliferate, but apparently not the cables.”

Did you read the article I linked to?

Here’s the first few lines:

“With Apple’s year of exclusivity coming to its end, Thunderbolt is set to make its way to the PC market. By far the strongest evidence of this we’ve seen so far is Sumitomo’s NAB exhibit, which features a Thunderbolt cable connecting an IBM ThinkPad to a LaCie Little Big Disk, with a monitor daisy chained off the back”

Here’s another: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sumitomo-electric-launches-optical-thunderbolt-000000960.html

Jeremy