161–170 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Electrical or optical cables From http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm I don't know what that means though. Does the newly released MBP support both or only one?
Light Peak right now is only copper. Optical will be added in the future most likely.
Obviously the OS would have a long way to go to support that kind of thing, but I would be surprised if in five years your typical "home directory" isn't either entirely cloud-based or uses a scheme like this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but 1) USB3 has a 1 year lead - check out how many products are out already 2) 5Gbps vs 10Gbps. There are just a couple of SSDs that need SATA III (6Gbps) because the 3Gbps isn't enough. You just don't need the speed for disk I/O. What for then? Current DisplayPorts 1.2 has 17Gbps so I don't really see the Thunderbolt replacing it. also Firewire 800 was substantially faster in theoretical and particularly in pra…
#2 is classic technology short-sightedness. How many times have people said that a 100 GB Hard Drive, 2 GB RAM, etc. is more than sufficient?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since there's only one port, you'll most likely need a splitter to use both the data and video simultaneously, unless you want your existing monitor to be at the end of the daisy chain. (DP was brought to market for terminal devices, not pass-through like Firewire, any Thunderbolt devices will most certainly have two ports.) I assume most monitors will transition from DP to a Thunderbolt pass-through quickly, but in…
Display Port has allowed daisy chaining monitors since 1.2 at least, if not earlier back.
i sense multiple external screens on a MBP :D
Wonder how many monitors this can push. Also, what will happen to Apples 30pin connector on their iPods,iPhones... I guess we will know Tuesday. Are there any external hard drives with thunderbolt yet?
The bandwidth is apparently entirely unimpressive. DisplayPort is currently at 17.28 Gbps, so Thunderbolt can push ... 0.6 monitors? ;) (In the worst case, at least) I have been excited about Light Peak/Thunderbolt for a year or so now, but in that time it seems the ambitions have become smaller, and the competition has developed as well.
It lists 2560x1600x30bpp @ 60Hz as using just over 8Gbps, so any one consumer monitor will work fine over Thunderbolt.
The 17.28Gbps speed would only be needed for multiple monitors or a high-resolution, high-color-depth, high-refresh or 3D monitor. Thunderbolt and full-speed DisplayPort both have enough aggregate bandwidth for four 1080p streams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And so is FW unless you buy one of the very expensive interfaces that happens to have highly optimized fine tuned drivers. Source: personal experience finding the drivers of most FW audio interfaces under $1000 impose outrageous CPU loads when doing many channels and using more than one device on the supposedly daisy chainable FW bus.
Funny, my experience is the opposite--FireWire drivers are generally very DMA oriented and require little to no CPU at all, while USB drivers tend to need more CPU for the protocol overhead. This is because FireWire is an address oriented bus and the hardware can map FireWire addresses to CPU addresses and DMA in and out with (literally) zero CPU overhead. A driver write would really have to go out of their way to ma…
I chose FireWire over USB because of all the complaints I saw in the Amazon reviews for every USB audio interface I looked at; many of the FireWire audio interfaces had absolutely glowing reviews.
I've had similarly excellent experiences with disks connected via FireWire.
So the whole USB2.0/Firewire is going to repeat? Sigh.
Thunderbolt aims to replace nearly every kind of single-use connectors (HDMI, DisplayPort, eSATA, USB, Ethernet). Unifying the connector for displays, peripherals, network and power is a great idea, so I can't complain if they're going up against USB 3.0.
Is this peer-2-peer like FireWire was or it is a client-server model like USB? I see people talking about this being copper or fibre. If this is fibre, then it can't supply power to the device like USB? I don't see that catching on for most portable devices (e.g. hard drives). It's extremely convenient to just have one cable for a device that needs connectivity and power when it comes to portable devices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
my sister recently plugged a usb cable into an ethernet port. don't assume that because something seems like a massive amount of kludgery to you that a user won't do it anyway.
I plugged a USB cable into an Ethernet port many times! Not intentionally, obviously, but I did it because the USB plug has just the right width to fit snugly in an Ethernet port. It’s easy to do when you are not looking. You should try it, it even feels sort of right in a very wrong way. There is no kludgery involved when plugging USB cables into Ethernet ports. They just fit perfectly.