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Thunderbolt demo

S

Serpico

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 8, 2000
Messages
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Engadget posted a video of Intel showing off Light Peak (I guess we're now calling it Thunderbolt...)

They daisy-chain a Macbook Pro to a Promise NAS, which is also connected to a 27" DisplayPort monitor. They do high speed data transfer of multiple 1080p videos from the Promise RAID device while simultaneously delivering that video to the display over the same cable.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/intel-thunderbolt-a-closer-look/

Technically speaking, this is hot shit. I know editors who want this in Mac Pros right now so that they can edit multiple uncompressed HD streams using external storage without a fiber card. Now I really see why Intel decided to pass on USB 3.0 and leapfrog onto something way faster and more useful.
 
Yeah, for the first year or so this will mainly be the domain of professionals, video editors and such. It'll trickle down well though, considering that Thunderbolt (goddamn I dislike that name) is compatible with USB, Firewire, and DisplayPort.

It really seems ideal for docking station type solutions, just one single plug and you have your monitor, external hard drive, mouse, keyboard, wired printers, etc etc, all hooked in
 
The only new technology there is the integration of lightpeak, which the transfer speeds are seriously impressive. I'm not sure if I would rather "daisy-chain" to the monitor out of the storage device, or just split the cable coming out of the thunderbolt port though.
 
People have also been trying to do external video card defile for laptops for better gaming at home but good portability. Is this the holy Grail for that? Can we now hook up a gtx580 and plug in through thunderbolt and play full resolution games?? Any thoughts, is the bandwidth enough?
 
Wouldn't it be limited to the HD's read/write speed?

For example if I want to transfer something to my external HD using thunderbolt a regular 7200RPM drive will only transfer it at around 80-100 MB/S
 
Yea, the hard drive speed will certainly limit the speed of transfer. But, when you're working with RAID arrays, the larger the array the less this is a limiting factor. And with SSDs this is becoming even less of a limiting factor all around.
 
robmarti25 said:
People have also been trying to do external video card defile for laptops for better gaming at home but good portability. Is this the holy Grail for that? Can we now hook up a gtx580 and plug in through thunderbolt and play full resolution games?? Any thoughts, is the bandwidth enough?
Click to expand...

Yea, Thunderbolt makes external video cards within the realm of possibility. I'd be all over it. The only problem I see with Apple is the limited driver availability since they don't support all of the video cards.
 
anthrex said:
I wonder if this will be integrated into video cards.
Click to expand...

It already is in the sense that it is combined with Display Port on the MBP. Or are you talking about discrete graphics cards made by nVidia and ATi? I'm sure it will happen, and quickly, but as people are saying in this thread and in articles, probably only high-end studio applications at first... and then trickle-down etc.
 
Just got my 15" SB MBP, good god it's fast!!!!! I'm using the thunderbolt port as mini-displayport right now. It's pretty incredible. There are tons of small changes they made too such as slightly rounding the edges on the aluminum unibody, it has a kind of buffed shine to it. The bezel around the display is nicer too, overall you can tell them did some retooling to further finalize the design. Can't wait to get a thunderbolt drive and see what it can do.
 
Appa said:
Just got my 15" SB MBP, good god it's fast!!!!! I'm using the thunderbolt port as mini-displayport right now. It's pretty incredible. There are tons of small changes they made too such as slightly rounding the edges on the aluminum unibody, it has a kind of buffed shine to it. The bezel around the display is nicer too, overall you can tell them did some retooling to further finalize the design. Can't wait to get a thunderbolt drive and see what it can do.
Click to expand...

Care to list your full system specs? Did you get the upper model 15" with the better graphics card? SSD? 8GB of RAM?
 
robmarti25 said:
People have also been trying to do external video card defile for laptops for better gaming at home but good portability. Is this the holy Grail for that? Can we now hook up a gtx580 and plug in through thunderbolt and play full resolution games?? Any thoughts, is the bandwidth enough?
Click to expand...

Being able to hook up my laptop to a 6000 series or a 500 series would be epic... I've been looking for a solution like this for a while and now it seems as though it
Might be a possibiltity
 
mobusta1 said:
Being able to hook up my laptop to a 6000 series or a 500 series would be epic... I've been looking for a solution like this for a while and now it seems as though it
Might be a possibiltity
Click to expand...

I'm sure someone will make an adapter, but ThunderBolt is the equivalent of PCIe 1.0 x5. Once it scales to 100Gbits (More than current PCIe 2.0 x16 @ 64Gbits) we will have a no-brainer solution. Before then, top of the line cards will be bottlenecked by the bus.

I would not be surprised to see Thunderbolt sporting 32GBits (1.0 x16) next year. Once we get past that, the bottlenecks start to fade. Intel has hinted at 100Gbits for 2013. We'll see.


Personally, I'm stoked! A new universal interface to supplement USB 2.0. Now that I have seen what this tech can do, the rumor someone made of the iPad3 sporting a mini-DP connector makes sense. Although, I would think it would be more likely to maintain the same dock connector and use mini-DP instead of USB.(Thunderbolt as a supplement to USB, not removing USB from the dock pinout) Thunderbolt can supply 10W, so that takes care of charging and syncing. It could also mean the iPad would do target mode as well as host mode for displays. Then again, this is pure speculation.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Care to list your full system specs? Did you get the upper model 15" with the better graphics card? SSD? 8GB of RAM?
Click to expand...

Sure. It's the "base" model 15" with 2.0Ghz i7, 4gb 1333 mem, 500gb 5400rpm HD, etc.

I walked into my local apple store with my 3 month old 15" that was the i5 model, and asked the manager if I could swap it for the new one and they allowed me. Pretty amazing customer service!!!
 
Talking of running video cards over this interface is cool, and the bandwidth is definitely there to some day have "Thunderbolt video card dongles", but what is the latency of this interface? That's probably going to be the biggest limiting factor in using this for anything more than super-high-speed external storage.
 
InorganicMatter said:
Talking of running video cards over this interface is cool, and the bandwidth is definitely there to some day have "Thunderbolt video card dongles", but what is the latency of this interface? That's probably going to be the biggest limiting factor in using this for anything more than super-high-speed external storage.
Click to expand...

Wrong. It's very low, perfect for just about anything. :)

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
 
Appa said:
Wrong. It's very low, perfect for just about anything. :)

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
Click to expand...

They only mention using it as an actual display output, not as a video rendering device.

We'll see what happens, but it's piggybacked on a PCIe bus and has some overhead of its own, so its latency will be greater than or equal to that of a PCIe bus. The only number I could find is 8ns/operation, but I don't know enough about how modern 3D rendering works and how often the host system accesses video memory. For my little ARM-based peripheral I program, a bus latency of 8ns would be amazing, but all I do over it is make some calls to the system ROM periodically.

Also, can't wait to hear the flood of tears from PC guys about how Apple is colluding with Intel to make this proprietary since it's using DisplayPort for the interface.
 
Appa said:
I walked into my local apple store with my 3 month old 15" that was the i5 model, and asked the manager if I could swap it for the new one and they allowed me. Pretty amazing customer service!!!
Click to expand...

Can you please elaborate on this? (WTF?!?)
 
Appa said:
Sure. It's the "base" model 15" with 2.0Ghz i7, 4gb 1333 mem, 500gb 5400rpm HD, etc.

I walked into my local apple store with my 3 month old 15" that was the i5 model, and asked the manager if I could swap it for the new one and they allowed me. Pretty amazing customer service!!!
Click to expand...

Cool, glad you like the rig. I wouldn't mind a quick freebee upgrade myself.
 
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