“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.]