Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thunderbolt in current and future laptops

marco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 27 posts

Re: Thunderbolt in current and future laptops

#2

Post by kylec »

In addition to being able to reduce the size of laptops, I hope Thunderbolt will enable the next generation Cinema display to feature gigabit ethernet and firewire connectors, making it possible to connect a single cable (two, if you count the MagSafe) to seamlessly transform a laptop into an iMac.

Re: Thunderbolt in current and future laptops

#3

Post by daimyoyo »

I'm excited to see what devices are created for Thunderbolt. It seems to me to be like the LED was: a solution in search of a problem and history seems to indicate that exciting things come from solutions in search of problems. For example, imagine being able to connect to FIOS directly through Thunderbolt for 10GB/s bidirectional speeds. You could livestream 4K video with bandwidth to spare. Welcome to the future, gentleman.

Re: Thunderbolt in current and future laptops

#4

Post by zdw »

kylec wrote: post #2

In addition to being able to reduce the size of laptops, I hope Thunderbolt will enable the next generation Cinema display to feature gigabit ethernet and firewire connectors, making it possible to connect a single cable (two, if you count the MagSafe) to seamlessly transform a laptop into an iMac.

Thunderbolt (and Displayport, in v1.2) also supports a daisy chain topology, so even if it didn't, you could plug such a device between the display and the laptop..

Re: Thunderbolt in current and future laptops

#6

Post by riobard »

kylec wrote: post #2

In addition to being able to reduce the size of laptops, I hope Thunderbolt will enable the next generation Cinema display to feature gigabit ethernet and firewire connectors, making it possible to connect a single cable (two, if you count the MagSafe) to seamlessly transform a laptop into an iMac.

When Intel was demonstrating Light Peak and citing Apple as a collaborator, I was hoping that they could go with optical fiber embedded in the MagSafe power cord.

Maybe it will be in the next generation of Thunderbolt.

Re: Thunderbolt in current and future laptops

#7

Post by masklinn »

cloudwalking wrote: post #5

I hope somebody is planning an external graphics card.

Would be very slow, considering a thunderbolt channel is roughly similar to 1x PCI-E v3.

I would also expect greater latencies than on internal PCI-E.

While it would probably be nice for GPGPU cases where not (if mot all) the working set stays on-board, that's far from the general usage case for GPUs right now.

Even for multiple-screen it would not be that useful: DisplayPort 1.2 handles chaining, and where you have two Thunderbolt ports you have two DisplayPort ports.

Post reply on HN