“Light Peak… excuse me, Thunderbolt, is truly the interconnect of the future,” Matt Burns reports for TechCrunch. “The technology launched today on Apple’s latest MacBook Pros, but Apple is just one of a bunch of companies with plans to support Intel’s technology.”
“One of the big draws to Thunderbolt is that it’s dual-protocol. That means it can support both PCI Express and DisplayPort-type connections from a single Thunderbolt Port,” Burns reports. “This sort of explains why there’s only a single Thunderbolt port on the new MBPs. Nearly anything can be ran from this single port: DisplayPort connections (big ol’ high-res monitors), data transfers (big ol’ high-speed storage drives) and, with the right adapter, DVI, HDMI, VGA, FireWire, eSATA, and Gigabit Ethernet will work with existing PCI Express drivers already supported at the OS layer.”
Burns reports, “In a world of monstrous video files and raw data, Speed is paramount. Fortunately, Thunderbolt is fast — really fast. The standard is rated at 10 Gbps over two channels, which works out to transferring a Blu-ray disc in less than 30 seconds. That’s 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and 12 times faster than the industry speed demon, FireWire 800. Engadget stated in an early Thunderbolt MacBook Pro demo they watched a 5GB file transfer in ‘just a few seconds.'”
“The dual-channel bidirectional design allows for two channels each running at 10 gigabits per second. Thunderbolt devices can be daisy-chained together, with each of the two independent channels able to blast data out at a full 10 Gbps to the primary device and others downstream. To tone down the geek-speak a bit: you can have a device pulling and pushing data at 10 Gbps, or have a couple devices daisy-chained all running at incredibly fast rates,” Burns reports. “Intel expects Thunderbolt to hit 100 Gbps by the end of the decade.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve always hated USB. It can’t die fast enough. (Dell PCs will probably start offering Light Peak by 2015, and they’ll discontinue USB by 2018, if the company even exists by then.)
Apple can’t add Thunderbolt ports to iPads and iPods quickly enough.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
MDN. LOL!!!
Agreed! Love MDN’s take!
Kind of funny, yeah… but Apple pioneered USB…
YES YES!!!! DIE USB DIE!!!!
I KICK IT IN THE FACE DIE!!!
I wonder if it’s to late to ask if thernderbolt is like rs232
or if it has anything like localtallk
Calm down USB isn’t going anywhere. It will be around for a long long time. I’m not seeing Thunderbolt Keyboards and mice anytime soon.
of course not and I don’t want them, that’s what bluetooth is for
Thunderbolt keyboards and mice? I’d be more than happy just to find some of those ‘right adapters’ that would allow connection to DVI HDMI and Firewire.
The only Thunderbolt adapter available anywhere is the HTC phone charger.
Have some patience. Thunderbolt was just announced *today*. Also the current DisplayPort to HDMI adapters/cables work just fine with Thunderbolt.
Do you remember what serial devices were like BEFORE USB? It was a nightmare! I am grateful for USB – in its time it was a lifesaver. It revolutionized device connections and made parallel and serial ports obsolete. Let’s show a little gratitude to USB before dismissing it so unceremoniously.
Yes I do remember, I have had /much/ better experiences with rs232 (serial ports) then I have with usb
usb killed rs232 and didn’t really offer valid replacements for things that were lost (in much the same way that cds killed floppy disks and didn’t offer good replacements for many things that floppies (and now flash drives) could do)
so yes I will dismiss it I’ve been waiting for this day for 10 years and it has finally come. 🙂
theres your ceremony.
Now, if we could just come up with a new technology called “lightfoot”.
“Lightfoot” will no doubt be the laser implementation that follows onto Thunderbolt’s copper version.
Somebody at Intel must be an Eastwood fan.
Do you mean MS latest invention? I think it is called BigFoot
MS BigFoot in mouth or BigFool running the place?
That technology was already created. It’s down by your back stairs.
So, I assume you need a Thunderbolt capable device on the other end, like a hard drive. Is it just the transfer protocol, or does the drive hardware need to be different as well.
Can it be used for networking? It’s alot faster than my gigabit switched network in the house.
No. Lightpeak, errrr Thunderbold, is a transport medium. With the proper adapter you could hook up a DVI based monitor to it, you could hook up a Firewire 800 based RAID to it or you could hook up a USB 3.0 SSD to it.
This will be a single port on the computer with a LOT of different adapters for each kind of device being hooked up to it — until (or if) the device vendors start supporting it directly.
Even then the PROTOCOL of the data being sent over it will still be SATA or USB or whatever.
LightPeak/Thunderbolt is definitely the future. But that said, why the hate on USB? Seems to have done a pretty decent job up until now.
usb has acutely been terrible and slow (exept for mass storage that seems to work reliably) but /everything/ else that uses it seems to work only half the time (exept for keyboards and mice on a mac (but not a pc)) go ahead and try to sync a calculator, use a verizion usb modem etc even apples own mobile device apis sometimes fail.
so agian I say DIE!!!!! DIE!!!!! USB DIE!!!!!!
and I have always hated it (I would always gravitate toward things that used rs232 ports)
HMMmmmm The copper version implemented by Apple provides 10w of bus power. Hmmm what do I know that requires 10w of power exactly. Hmmm
iPad2 with thunderbolt anyone…fill your 32G iPad 2 in less then a minute.
You nailed it… That is the mysterious port on the side that people are curious about.
I was just thinking the same thing. Thunderbolt on the iPad2.
USB sucks because it’s a draw on the CPU and the damn connector is awful. Long live asymmetrical connectors.
That’s true. You have to make sure that usb is right side up.
Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode?
Maybe that should be Thunderbolt Disk Mode. 😉
suck it USB! you’ve been pwned…
maybe USB 10.0 will be as fast thunderbolt…
“Nearly anything can be ran from this single port.”
Impressive indeed, but can you ran a grammar checker?
lol 😀
were you on the as mailing list when we had that debate about script assistant?
Apple don’t have PLANS to support TB, but DEVICES shipping now.
It seems to me that the problem with Thunderbolt is that users of large-screen monitors, who are probably the most likely to need screaming-fast data transfer, won’t be able to use the Thunderbolt port for this purpose because their monitors will be plugged in. Am I missing something?
I might be wrong but I think it’s possible to for an adapter to split one Thunderbolt port into multiple connections. So you could have Firewire, eSATA and DVI plugged in to one Thunderbolt port if you have the right adapter.
But once Thunderbolt catches on, I think manufacturers will start shipping devices with more than port to keep it from getting ridiculous.
You can daisy chain devices on it so all you need is the monitor to have an aditional TB port on it and connect devices to that.
If the monitor needs a Thunderbolt port, then no existing monitors would work. The question is how fast the data transfer would be if external drives are plugged into firewire or USB ports on the monitor?
You plug your monitor into an ADAPTOR.
Plug ANYTHING currently made that plugs into any port currently on a computer that handles data, video, audio, etc.
ANYTHING.
One port to rule them all…
One Mac to find them…
One Steve to bring them all…
And Thunderbolt will bind them…
Lacie already has a drive advertised.
Hoping the next version of AirPort Extreme and EyeTV HD use it.
Am I repeating myself?
Awesome! I can’t wait to get one……and return it for repairs……and return it again….and again….
Shouldn’t they just have called it Firewire Extreme? I mean, it carries power and it’s daisy-chainable and it’s not USB. Okay, IEEE394 trademark issues, but still.
why is Dell even in business-LOL
Hopefully connectors will be available to split the one output into many.
Some days a USB peripheral, be it a HD for a flash drive, just isn’t recognized. I also have a 16Gb usb flash drive that is sooooo slow, I think I could write the file directory by hand faster that it can transfer it….and no, reformatting didn’t help it.
Firewire was great, USB always sucked
the usb connectors on my various laptops have never seemed to work reliably all the time, the slightest change in orientation makes the drive disconnect, and the connector has always seemed “loose” in the port.
Other than for full disk backups, in an office where you don’t deal with large and or video files, USB 1.1 does OK for general work. I have been using an old USB 1.1 hub on my MBP’s over the years with 2 printers, Scansnap, (and now Time Machine) for about 8 years, and never had a problem.
Like the new MacBook Air, I wonder if between possibly the new NC Server Farm (or whatever it’s called), the revised MobileMe service (cloud) and thunderbolt, if Apple will put in larger SSD, memory, bigger battery and take out SuperDrive and only have two Thunderbolt ports and an array of adapters and slim down MBP to MBA size whenever they overhaul the next redesign?
If ThunderBolt is copper it has to transform into fiber in the future – another Pain!
Apple could have gotten rid of a lot of ports on their Macs if they wanted users to rely on adaptors. My guess is that FireWire 800 will be abandoned a long time before USB 2 or ethernet.
Obviously most here don’t remember SCSI. USB was indeed better @ the time, in respect to the simplicity of connectivity. HOWEVER I must agree with the USB DIE!! Sentiment …. Very old school and long in the tooth… Long live THUNDERBOLD! Garcia Rocks!!! With the new FCP coming out…… Things are gonna get stanger .. SO let’s get on with the SHOW!!! Happy Birthday Steve! You are an American Beauty Icon. You ROCK!
stranger… Is what I meant to say… Sorry..
On another note… How many of you here, ever had to use 44mb SyQuest removable drives and disks to transfer data from computer to computer? Yeah. 44mb NOT gb.. You kids have it so !$?! in EASY today.
Remember the Iomega drives and removable disks?
Agreed that Firewire will go long before USB will. I suppose Light Peak-Thunderbolt will allow one to boot from it? SCSI was nice it its day, and perfect for computer nerds.
U call in’ me a nerd aaAttendee? 😉 I wuz one of the first to set up a RAID system for PPC 8100. go figure. Peace.