Why Thunderbolt Is Dead In the Water 568
adeelarshad82 writes "In the same way that Apple championed FireWire for the replacement of parallel SCSI, Thunderbolt is meant as the next big thing in video and audio peripheral interfaces. Plus, it's Apple's move to beat USB 3.0. However, Thunderbolt is off to a slow start, for a number of reasons — from cost to the technology's features in comparison to USB 3.0 — which is why it may be dead in the water."
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
New technology is expensive and uncommon a couple months after release. News at 11.
What the hell is Thunderbolt? (Score:1, Insightful)
The first thought when I read that was "... is this a P-47 or something?"
Is it possible this thing's major failing is that few people have heard of it? (ignoring that if it comes from Apple, it's probably a proprietary standard with licensing fees to match...)
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's not turn all the world into a pro wrestling match...
Apple built Thunderbolt with Intel, not against them. If it was only about fighting USB, they wouldn't team up.
Sensationalist article with no substance (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think theres no compelling difference between the CPU-bound USB 3.0 and what is essentially an external PCIe connector, you need to go back and do some more research. LightPeak /Thunderbolt is just plain better than USB3.0; downsides do include lack of backwards compatibility, and that may prove to be its biggest obstacle, but to argue that "USB3.0 is good enough" is just wrong.
As for price, USB3.0 has been out for about a year now, with Thunderbolt only having rolled off the shelves-- and this, only in Apples computers so far-- a few months ago. Right now, on newegg, im only seeing USB3.0 on highend multi-hundred-dollar motherboards, so it seems to be a wash in that regard.
Its way too early to tell, and anyone saying otherwise is full of it.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
That much is obvious, yes. But if you read the article, you will see that the author's primary problem with Thunderbolt is that it offers practically no improvement over USB3, while cutting out the backwards compatibility that was originally intended in the LightPeak demo. Combine that with the high cost of entry, and why would anyone want to switch to the new technology? Without high volume, the price will never come down. THAT is what the author meant.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
A good parallel is the 3.5mm headphone jack. Frankly, it's stupidly large and poorly designed for what it needs to do (USB isn't). But it will never be replaced by another (wired) connector in it's application space. There's just too many of them, and it's hard to make a compelling case for replacement for 98% of users.
Re:Excuse me? (Score:4, Insightful)
The USB logo goes "up", Brainiac.
Neither of my Flash drives have a USB logo on them. I've no idea about my other USB devices.
In any case, even if that was true it's a piss-poor substitute for a properly designed connector.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I still have a Mac with HDI-45 connector for Apple's AudioVision 14 display. The monitor died years ago (Florida thunder storm) but was nice, having ADB connections on it. And I'm currently using 4 Apple ADC monitors, each on $100 adapter box that allows me to connect their single cable connection up to a modern Intel Mac.
Do I like the idea of single cable monitors? Hell yeah!
Do I think they'll take off? Eh... not likely. And I'm still bummed Firewire never took off as AV equipment interconnects. Would make my home theater setup a lot cleaner.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
The author is an idiot. Comparing USB and thunderbolt just proves it. Thunderbold will expose pci-express lanes to external devices. USB does not even have DMA.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean no improvement other than basically making the PCI Express bus available to any device that wants to use it?
No improvement other than running TWO bi-directional 10 Gbps channels through a single connector? (4x USB 3.0)
No improvement other than allowing manufacturers to build Firewire, eSATA, USB, and even USB 3.0 adaptors and docks connecting to a single port?
No improvement other than (in the future) allowing you to snap in a MagSafe power cord and get power AND Thunderbolt connectivity?
No improvement other than letting you run multiple monitors simultaneously? (new iMac)
Those "no improvements"?
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thunderbolt is at 10 GB/s per channel giving 20 GB/s total.
s/channel/direction/
e.g. if you are capturing video, you have a max of 10 GB/s for the incoming video data, and 10 GB/s to send "stop" and "play" commands to the device.
Standardizing is a big win (Score:4, Insightful)
Thunderbolt is designed more to replace eSATA and FireWire than USB.
Neither one of which has taken the world by storm... Frankly we don't really need a replacement for either of those. They're fine but niche. There is more to having a successful interface than transfer rates. Cost to manufacture, legacy hardware compatibility, current equipment needs, licensing terms, customer demand and more all play a role. The opportunity for Thunderbolt is if it can combine the video (usually VGA/DVI/HDMI) and peripheral ports (usually USB) into a single interface. USB replaces several types of cables but it isn't quite capable enough to replace dedicated video cables. It's not clear that USB3 will be fast enough either. If Thunderbolt is cheap enough to manufacture and has a performance advantage that lets people further reduce the number of different cables they need, then it will have a chance.
What is wanted is something that is fast, cheap, compatible, reliable, easy to configure and minimizes the number of different cables we need. Frankly most PCs should ideally have no more than two cable types - one high power cable to power the device (when needed) and one type of data cable that can also handle low voltage DC power needs. Nothing wrong with using specialized cables for specific performance needs but that doesn't apply to most of us most of the time. I don't really care if the data cable is USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt or something else entirely but there is a lot to be gained by standardizing on a suitable general purpose data cable. USB comes closest to this ideal right now. (Yes Firewire could do the job but it's too expensive and lost that battle with USB long ago) Perhaps Thunderbolt will take it the next step. Only time will tell.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
External DMA is extremely useful - it dramatically reduces system load when accessing storage devices (whether single drives or drive arrays). This lets a notebook be used for data-intensive work (like video and photo work) with minimal overhead. DMA makes the difference between a pleasant experience and whimpering in the corner.
Claiming that external DMA is horrible idea is disingenuous; winlockpwn (or FireWire, or Thunderbolt) requires physical access to the machine, at which point security becomes a non-issue because there is none - DMA has nothing to do with it. If an attacker has physical access to a machine, the game is over.
More to the point: Winlockpwn is not a weakness of DMA, but in how Windows uses DMA. Windows has enough remote security problems; we don't need to go into the problems it has when an attacker has physical access.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Back when USB was introduced the same could be said versus the serial/RS-232 port. And interestingly Apple was one of the first manufacturer to support USB, too...
Business success means selling the consumer what they did not know they wanted, e.g. the iPad or the Roomba.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Technically speaking Firewire also tops at 3200Mbps. Unfortunately most products don't actually implement that. Exceptionally, the Mac Pro supports 3200Mbps and has done so for quite some time. However, the rest of the Apple products offer only 800Mbps. That is OK because I haven't yet seen any consumer products that actually use a 3200Mbps link over FW.
With Thunderbolt it's not about external disks. Except for a few users (think movie editing), most people will end up having a reasonably fast NAS at home. It is however about Thunderbolt based port replicators/docking stations, since it extends the PCI bus, thus being able to add USB controllers, NICs, FW cards and other devices physically to the computer by a single cable. They missed a great opportunity by not including also power over Thunderbolt. It could of been the single cable required to charge, dock and extend the screen of a Mac.
It's not the speed of Thunderbolt that matters, it's the PCI-E part that matters. Being able to extend the PCI-E bus has a lot of applications. Imagine an ultra-high density mac mini tray that extends the mac minis to add a second NIC (for redundancy), display and a LOM. That would make the Mac Mini the best server out there for hosting websites. In the width of a rack you can put 12 mac minis. In 800mm of depth plus 200 for cable routing you can put 4 rows of Mac Minis. That means 48 mac minis in 5u. That equals 384 mac minis in 40u. Simple math tells you that you can get at under $700/core a total of 768 cores with 4GB of RAM/core (including UPS and switches) in under $500k and under 33W/core in 2 racks (one with UPSs and one with the actual Mac Minis. No blade solution out there can beat that and even the cheapest ones are still at over $1000/core.