181–190 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes.. 50% chance of getting it right every time, even though it feels like less than that! It doesn't help that some motherboards put the USB ports upside-down for some inexplicable reason, and when it's dark you can't see the little USB logo on the cable anyway.
It's actually more like 33% chance. "Oh, wrong side. flip over Wrong again? Oh, I had it right the first time!"
It would be awesome if iPad2 had the same port... I say it's a possibility!
For those that don't know, the SGI Altix has a special chip that intercepts memory accesses and maps other systems memory to be seen as "local" on each system. If thunderbolt is just pci-e on a wire, you may be able to connect a few systems together and just map memory across systems. It'd take some trickery, and wouldn't be quite as fast as infiniband, but the thought of building a ghetto supercomputer would be useful to many people.
In fact, I'd probably take all of my current DAS and add it to the NAS pool as well. It would make my home office much quieter if I could hide all the spindles in another room and still have fast storage access.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not enough. That's talking about support from developers, not whether hardware vendors need to pay for licensing to include this tech in their hardware. That said, Mini DisplayPort is free of hardware licensing fees... so there's a good chance.
The poster of the question is a developer. I answered to help get the information he asked for, not have my answer graded on completeness or lack thereof with a curt "Not enough".
No hardware developer in the consumer space charges developers to access their hardware. Spec owners frequently do charge other companies to implement their specs, though.
Intel has a mixed record on this - some specs - like USB - they have led but have been implementable licence free.
Other things they consider their propriety interfaces and have sued over - see the recent lawsuits between Intel & Nvidia over their memory bus.
So it is very reasonable to wonder if Nvidia and AMD are going to be able to implement this freely, or are they going to have to pay a tax to Intel. As far as I can see your answer doesn't address that question at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes.. 50% chance of getting it right every time, even though it feels like less than that! It doesn't help that some motherboards put the USB ports upside-down for some inexplicable reason, and when it's dark you can't see the little USB logo on the cable anyway.
Oh, it's not so bad once you take advertising sub-clause of the spec into account. That's the hidden clause that states the USB logo will be on the top of a properly-oriented plug unless you're Microsoft or Logitech, in which case your corporate name is allowed top-billing, so to speak. Of course, if the slots are oriented vertically...
So the whole USB2.0/Firewire is going to repeat? Sigh.
USB2 and FireWire were close to the same speed. Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3 and can push DisplayPorts, so I doubt it will be the same.
Does anyone know if Thunderbolt is similar to FireWire in this way?