First Thunderbolt Peripherals Arrive To Market 259
MojoKid writes "Promise Technology recently launched the first Thunderbolt-compatible devices; the company's Pegasus RAID R4 and R6 storage solutions can now be ordered from the Apple Store. There's a catch, however. In order to use either storage array, one must first purchase a cable directly from Apple. The company has priced the two-meter cable at $50. As it turns out, Thunderbolt uses what's called an active cable. Inside the cable there's a pair of Gunnum GN2033 transceivers. The GN2033 is a tiny, low power transceiver chip designed to be placed inside the connectors at either end of a Thunderbolt cable, enabling dual bidirectional 10Gb/s concurrent links over narrow-gauge copper wires. The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence. Apple is the only company currently selling Thunderbolt cables."
passive was too hard. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:or maybe (Score:4, Informative)
How many "pro A/V studios" would you say are in circulation? Please express your answer as a percentage of the billions of computers, phones, mp3 players, and other consumer electronics that are sold every single year.
Don't bother calling NBC. They already know.
Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt (Score:5, Informative)
The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence.
Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel. Will you make a FireWire mouse? Probably not; you can hoist a cow on a standard FireWire cable. But once you have a USB mouse, why to get Firewire? Note that speedy peripherals were uncommon back then, except video cameras. And USB 3.x attacked that market; I have one USB 3.0 device here, an HDD, and it is backward compatible to USB 2.x.
However 2 x 10 Gbps is some good increase in speed. You don't need it for 99% of peripherals on the market; but when you need it you need it - like that RAID thingy which can generate and consume that much data. Your choices there are simple - either this Thunderbolt, which is more or less fixed, or a variety of 10 Gbps connections, copper or fiber, SFP+ or XFP or whatever. They all are very much different, locking you into some specific hardware, and they all run hot - bad news in a notebook.
10GBASE-T is one of competitors; it runs on slower clock and requires more pairs. But as long as it works, who cares? The twisted pair cable, even category 6A, is cheap, and the distance up to 100m is what you want in any reasonable setup that includes more than two boxes on top of each other. 10G Ethernet is also switchable and routable. Considering that Thunderbolt is a point to point transport for DisplayPort and PciE [wikipedia.org], it's use is probably limited to expansion ports; but it's probably pretty good in that role - even if majority of computers can't even handle the bandwidth, let alone have a need for such a thing.
Re:WTF is Thunderbolt? (Score:4, Informative)
WTF is Thunderbolt?
http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm [intel.com].
Re:passive was too hard. (Score:5, Informative)
The chips are tuned *per cable* as far as I heard, and thus cannot be included on-board. They would've if they could've.
regarding the fibreoptics, the cost was much higher than for copper. Not rocket science, but not exactly consumer-price either.
Re:or maybe (Score:5, Informative)
Not without some competition they won't. And Apple's patents will ensure there's very little competition
Intel owns the rights to Thunderbolt technology and trademarks. Apple helped develop it, which is why they happen to have the first cables and devices on the market.
Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad... (Score:5, Informative)
what matters is that it is special, Apple-born and exlcusive therefore carrying high profit margin.
Intel made it and owns the rights to it, apple just helped develop it. It's hardly "apple-born"
Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt (Score:5, Informative)
But do you really need it?
It beats SATA because it is not locked into ATA command set. Thunderbolt routes PCIe I/O, which means you can build any PCI peripheral and it will work as if you plugged it into the main board. You can have access to the RAM, use interrupts, DMA and whatever. There are many I/O devices out there that generate lots of data, and they are not disks. Medical sensors, scientific equipment, software-defined radios, high resolution / high frame rate cameras (for security and for machine vision,) external video cards and GPU... I can think of many examples.
Another item of interest is the DisplayPort channel. SATA doesn't support it, Thunderbolt does. Sure, you can always have a second cable... but why to use two when one works fine? The need for remote display devices is quite obvious, and one Thunderbolt jack can replace DP and SATA ports - something that a small device will appreciate.
Re:passive was too hard. (Score:5, Informative)
Because different cables can use different chips or firmware. The initial Intel release said that optical cables might be available in the future - same (electrical) sockets, but with an optical transciever built into each plug.
Also, Thunderbolt is not a USB replacement for attaching mice and cheap memory sticks - its an external PCIe bus and its killer apps will be things that you can't do with USB. Hence the first peripherals are things like kick-ass RAID arrays, fast SSDs, high end video capture/editing kit etc. One of the forthcoming peripherals is an external case to take a full-size PCIe card (try that with USB!)
So, lots of MacBook users are not going to use TB as anything other than a monitor port, so it makes sense to shift some of the component costs to the cable rather than the motherboard.
Re:or maybe (Score:5, Informative)
The design behind thunderbolt is intel, not apple. They just partnered with apple to get it out into production. The technology is actually pretty nifty; unlike other interfaces where you're dealing with a separate controller, thunderbolt basically creates an external pci-express port. So, anything a normal expansion card can do can now be made modular. It's got some very sexy potential. Imagine never having to get more than a decent proc and ram because video cards now plug into your laptop's thunderbolt port. You could have thunderbolt enabled televisions which include a graphics adapter. There's some cool potential. Let's see if it actually gets off the ground though.