I was surprised about the symbol as well. It's just a matter of time until someone gets hurt while trying to connect their peripherals to a transformer.
Perhaps true, but how exactly would you mate the connector with a high voltage power source without a massive amount of kludgery?
If you've ever done field tech work, freelance or otherwise, you'd know that mere physical incompatibility isn't going to stop some people from plugging nearly any connector into nearly any port.
What happens if I plug a PC into another PC via thunderbolt?
Hopefully the same as when you plug a Mac into another Mac via FireWire. (One of the Macs becomes the most expensive external HDD ever. This requires one Mac to reboot into the target disk mode. It would be nice if the same trick would be possible with Thunderbolt without rebooting.)
You don't have to use TDM. You can also use Firewire as a network interface.
Seriously. As a non-Mac user, I really can't see going out of my way to use anything other than USB at this point, especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed.
> especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed. For some uses it's not just a matter of speed - USB2 and FW are similar in terms of speed but USB2 is pretty much unusable for multi-channel audio recording purposes.
That's USB2, not USB3, and also something that 99% of computer users are not going to run into.
Two questions: Is it royalty-free? If the answer is negative, what are the licensing terms?
Thunderbolt technology leverages the native PCI Express and
DisplayPort device drivers available in many operating systems today. This native software support means no extra software development is required to use a Thunderbolt technology enabled product.
It has two independent 10Gbps channels, so it can do 20Gbps.
That's not really relevant as long as you can't choose the directions for the channels. You are only going to get one channel in each direction. Edit: Whoa. I just re-read parts of the Intel documentation, and it seems there are indeed two independent downstream channels. My bad. It also looks like there is no provision for using both channels for a single device? I have no idea.
2x10Gbps is still enough to drive two 2560x1600 displays at 60Hz, which is all the prior DisplayPort implementation could do.
Ha. Good luck to them. Thunderbolt will be lucky to replace firewire. There's no way in the world it can replace USB, Ethernet or HDMI. Just think of the number of devices out there with these ports. It might replace SATA eventually, but it will have to fight against USB.
From the Apple page on Thunderbolt: "you can use existing USB and FireWire peripherals — even connect to Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks — using simple adapters." So, twice as fast as USB 3.0 and compatible with existing devices. Doesn't seem like much of a fight. USB won't disappear overnight, but it's already obsolete.
Thunderbolt may be technically superior in every single way, but unless other manufacturers use it for their laptops/motherboards, Apple's 10ish% market share is going to ensure that USB 3.0 "wins" ultimately. This will wind up being just like firewire where aside from Apple's stuff and a select few "Apple" manufacturers, nobody uses it and consumers either buy the more expensive Apple stuff, or use a dongle and see 0 benefit from the superior tech.
Because serial is a trivial interface to implement in home brew electronics, just throw in a MAX232.
Even many major consumer electronics are still developed via a serial console. Sure they have fancier connectors to talk to your PC and the network but serial is so simple it's practically idiot proof. So it breaks far less often, makes new hardware much simpler to bring up, and it allows you to debug the fancier interfaces without interfering with their operations.
Kinda cheezy name. Also, the plugs on the Intel site don't look like mini displayport. Is the Apple version proprietary?
The pictures I've seen look like mDP to me. Apple invented Mini DisplayPort, so mDP is proprietary, but it's licensed for free and VESA later adopted it as part of the DisplayPort standard.