“Intel’s Thunderbolt interface is frustratingly fast,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech. “The frustration comes from the fact that there just aren’t many Thunderbolt devices out on the market today, not to mention that the vast majority of systems don’t support the interface.”
“One potential usage model is for a notebook to connect to an external box offering PCIe slots,” Lal Shimpi reports. “It’s this usage model that Magma hopes to target with its ExpressBox 3T.”
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Lal Shimpi reports, “The ExpressBox 3T features three PCIe 2.0 expansion slots in an external chassis. No word on the width of each slot (x4? x8? x16?). The box has an internal 220W power supply and there’s no support for auxillary power connectors so you can forget about installing a beefy video card. Magma hasn’t announced pricing or availability or any other details for that matter.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” and “Andrew W.” for the heads up.]
Uad on a laptop?
Pretty much 😀 and iMac
Apple needs to get the price down if they want wider acceptance. $50 for just the cable means that most will stick with FireWire or USB 2 / 3, no matter how much better tBolt is. Also, I’m not sure a cable that has transceivers in both ends will work-out well; that’s too complicated.
Sour Grapes?
I am looking forward to using that speed and a fifty dollar cable doesn’t bother me.
I use $50 cables to tie up my garbage bags.
Well actually, my lowly servants do.
Did you run out of Zune headphones?
@_Bill_
1 – The transceivers aren’t just something Apple chose to do to be cool. They’re necessary to use tech developed for optical use over copper wires.
2 – There are people who need speed. They will pay the early adopter surcharge.
3 – With time and adoption, prices will come down — both on the current copper version and future optical.
4 – Copper Thunderbolt screams. Optical Thunderbolt will break the sound barrier.
This is something I’ve not quite understood yet.
When we read or write to magnetic rotating media like a hard drive, isn’t that the bottleneck right now, not the interface?
So I guess until tech matures sufficiently to give us storage for something that can read/write at speeds at least as fast as tbolt, using tbolt for storage won’t provide much speed improvement over today’s storage speeds, correct?
For those that need the speed, the bottlenecks can be overcome — SSDs, caches, RAIDs. It’s always a seesaw — the interfaces get better, then the devices, then the interfaces, then the devices, and on and on.
If not, we’d all still be using 110 baud modems and be dang happy for them.
Some MacBook Airs are shipping with SSDs capable of 200MB/s read and write speeds. That’s already much faster than USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 can deliver, and arguably such a drive would still be hampered by USB 3.0 overhead.
Of course there are even faster RAIDs and such, but this is not a high-end niche product: people are buying them in the millions. As we continue to move away from rotating media, speeds are only going to get better from here on; there will always be a use for fast interfaces.
When you’re writing to a single drive yes, the limit is the physics of the drive. When you’re writing to a RAID array though, the limit is parallelized, as it were. Keep in mind also, that SSDs are coming into wider use.
-jcr
Anyone else remember when they made these external chassis for Macs?
“So I guess until tech matures sufficiently to give us storage for something that can read/write at speeds at least as fast as tbolt, using tbolt for storage won’t provide much speed improvement over today’s storage speeds, correct?”
Wrong assumption! There is a video of a MacBook Pro hooked up to an extremely fast RAID array via Thunderbolt on You Tube from Intel.
That is FAST! Look at the demo. TB can also stream four different HDTV movies at the exact same time as shown in this demo.
The external three card PCie is simple compared to this. TB can do it all, it is that fast!
Wonder why that with a power supply that they couldn’t build in ability to power high end graphics card. That is the first improvement I can think of for a laptop. It’s been a while since I’ve used specialized I/O control cards.