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Thunderbolt, really?
Gentleman;
I’m more often in the field or traveling and therefore Apple laptop based. With your long-time industry perspective, should I be crazy excited about the new laptops connection. 10Gbps transfer? How long before connections/adapter are made (or will they?)? I ask here, where the data transfer pros reside…ML
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14 Replies
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Promise, AJA, LaCie are already onto it – not sure how long before they actually ship something. It is a great piece of technology.
PCIe (and Express34/54) adapters for installation into existing laptops and desktops will arrive soon too.
Searching for “thunderbolt” in Apple store yields nothing but Promise rolled out a press release with their new Thunderbolt (shall we call it TB?) connectivity, to ship in Q2.
Alex
DV411 -
Promise starts shipping their 4 & 6 bay Storage in April, (pricing not yet set), interestingly enough it’ll only be sold at the Apple Store, (I was told). Eventually all the peripheral manufacturers will have something, time will tell. So much for USB 3.0
Jon
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Thank you Alex, Jon.
Looks like my Macbook Pro will be on Ebay soon…ML
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I’m pretty sure this is essentially PCIE 4X coming out in a port. So you can imagine ditching your expresscard/34 slot and connecting stuff with this. (but in a cabled fashion that you can daisy chain).
The PCIE protocol has always been a switched protocol.
Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications -
[Steve Modica] “I’m pretty sure this is essentially PCIE 4X coming out in a port”
That’s what Intel says too on their “Example PC System Diagram” – but I can’t figure out if the chip they are “making available to the industry” can be used to make a pure PCIe adapter, i.e. something you could stick in a 4x PCIe slot on a Mac Pro (or forgive me for this transgression: Z800) and have a ThunderBolt port (data only, I assume) on it.
It’s the DisplayPort part of TBolt spec that worries me – if required, it may make such a PCIe-to-Tbolt adapter impossible as an add-on PCIe card.
Would you agree?
Alex
DV411 -
[Alex Geroulaitis] ” but I can’t figure out if the chip they are “making available to the industry” can be used to make a pure PCIe adapter, i.e. something you could stick in a 4x PCIe slot on a Mac Pro”
The sense of this is backwards. The cards “creates” a PCIE 4X slot. It wouldn’t sit in one. It is a 4X slot (in the form of a plug). I don’t know what the back end is (perhaps it bolts onto the northbridge directly).
Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications -
[Steve Modica] “The sense of this is backwards. The cards “creates” a PCIE 4X slot. It wouldn’t sit in one. It is a 4X slot (in the form of a plug). I don’t know what the back end is (perhaps it bolts onto the northbridge directly).”
Take a look at the Intel diagram I linked above (top of page 3). It shows TBolt being a 4x PCIe device sitting on top of Intel PCH that also plugs into the DisplayPort.
The other clue is that the data portion of TBolt spec is basically a 4x PCIe extender, with the addition of daisy-chaining and a few other things.
Alex
DV411 -
Why don`t you sell it here or in another good forum when the time comes instead of giving e-Bay a mandatory cut?
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[Alex Geroulaitis] “PCIe (and Express34/54) adapters for installation into existing laptops and desktops will arrive soon too.”
I was so wrong – nothing like it. TBolt will not be available as on add-on card – but on motherboards only – apparently because it’s a combination interface (data and graphics) which is not feasible (or impossible) as an add-on card.
Alex
DV411 -
[Alex Geroulaitis] “TBolt will not be available as on add-on card”
Where did you learn this?
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