
Intel announces next-gen Thunderbolt with 20 Gbps throughput, 4K support - Lightning
http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/08/intel-announces-next-gen-thunderbolt-20-gbps-throughput/
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bluedino
USB 3.0 is 'fast enough' for most people and it's way, way cheaper. Only the
super-rich or professional market (who've abandoned Apple, haven't they?) can
afford things like daisy-chained Thunderbolt monitors.

Firewire never really caught on (with consumers) like Apple would have liked-
and it had huge advantages over USB (especially USB 1.0). I bought a Sony
laptop specifically because it had a i.Link port and I could daisy chain both
my CD-RW and 80GB HD.

Apple's decision to add not just a second Thunderbolt port but also to add an
HDMI port to their Retina MacBooks actually reduces demand for Thunderbolt
products since users now can connect multiple legacy monitors to their
machine. There's good and bad to cannibalizing the same port as video output.

External GPU? Nice idea, but between the cost of the GPU card, the housing,
and dealing with all the quirks that go with it, it makes sense to just buy
another laptop/desktop.

That said, a $99 Thunderbolt hub that gives 4-6 USB ports, gigabit LAN, video,
Firewire, headphone/mic would be a huge seller

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stock_toaster

      > External GPU? Nice idea, but between the cost of the GPU card, the housing, and dealing with all the quirks that go with it, it makes sense to just buy another laptop/desktop.
    

It would be pretty neat to have an external monitor with a gpu _inside it_.
Then the laptop only needs a gpu powerful enough to drive its own display,
instead of also driving external displays.

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sliverstorm
There are a host of issues with that, unfortunately. I think multi-gpu support
is still pretty crummy, and the cost of a good gpu _plus_ a monitor fancy
enough to do something so progressive? That's going to be crazy expensive.

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ChuckMcM
I suppose this is inevitable. The speed advantage is pretty impressive. And
the ability to run everything on your "desk" over one cable to the "computer"
is pretty handy too. Seem's like the NeXT cube [1] was only a bit more than 20
years before its time :-)

[1] <http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/2006/0611.html>

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r00fus
Wake me when someone creates an TB expansion worth having at costs that aren't
prohibitive.

The only thing that TB can do that USB3 can't right now is either running
multiple very high-res displays, or putting the graphics card off-motherboard.

I'd love to pair a MB Air with a "desktop dock" that had it's own graphics
system and replacing all my connectors other than power and TB.

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wcfields
Agree with this.

While the steps Thunderbolt is going is great, it's still too much money for
what it doesn't deliver. I'd love to have a TB attached SAN for my Macbook
Pro, but what I need is usually sufficed by FireWire 800* or USB 2.0 external
drive.

* Even a FW800 external drive / enclosure is many times cost prohibitive.

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mturmon
Too much money is a function of how bad you want the performance. I have a
Promise RAID attached to my MBP using TB, and it's really fast -- it makes
firewire 800 look unacceptably poky. It's been a long time since I measured
throughput, but it's like a factor of 10. If you work with large datasets,
it's a clear win.

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r00fus
How does that compare, though to a raided SSD tied directly to the PCI board?

I've been led to believe that 300k IOPS is possible using sub-$1000 gear from
OCZ [1]. Combined with an agressive backup to spinning disk, this sounds like
it'd scream like a monster and be stable to boot.

[1] <http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd>

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mturmon
These two devices (external TB RAID vs. internal PCI SSD) operate in somewhat
different parts of the (high end) of the bandwidth/capacity plane.

Anand ([http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-
th...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-
review/6)) found ~700MB/s sequential read/write performance of the TB RAID. He
didn't test IOPS directly, although he did put SSDs into the TB RAID and test
that (~1000 MB/s). You have to give him credit for that.

In short, the sequential performance is pretty close to the real-world
sequential performance of the OCZ unit. Which is quite impressive.

The Promise RAID-6 I use has 8TB usable (and I got it 2 years ago). The units
you mention have just 1TB usable (and no redundancy, which is a problem for
big data sets).

All this is somewhat academic for my use case, because I dropped my desktop
two years ago when TB came out.

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wtallis
Thunderbolt was introduced in 2011 with support for 10Gbps PCIe transport and
DisplayPort 1.1 (8.64 Gbps). DisplayPort 1.2 (which allows for 17.28 Gbps) was
finalized at the end of 2009. It's a bit surprising that it took Intel this
long to announce this update.

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X4
That's exactly what's I feel is so wrong in the industry. Intel isn't pushing
out new technologies and therefore "standards" into the market. Development is
stalled to a minimum innovation, maximum profit situation.

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wtallis
And more generally, Intel just isn't interested in equipping anything with
much bandwidth except in the high-end server market. Their current mainstream
consumer/low-end server/workstation platform has 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes direct from
the CPU (but only 16 are enabled for the consumer chips), and 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes
(20Gbps total) for the chipset and all the other peripherals to share. A
single one of these new Thunderbolt ports could monopolize _all_ of the
peripheral device bandwidth available through Intel's current CPU socket.
Copying a file from one SSD to another SSD uses more than half the available
bandwidth. It used to be that a desktop system had the advantage of being
upgradeable and expandable, but now you often need to get a new
CPU+motherboard in order for new peripherals to run at full speed.

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Tomdarkness
PCI Express 3.0 is 1GB/s aka 8Gb/s per lane, you seem to have got confused
between GB/s and Gb/s. Three lanes would give you more than you need for a new
thunderbolt port.

Also if you take x79 which is a consumer platform it has 40 PCI Express 3.0
lanes which would be enough for 16 of the new thunderbolt ports.

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wtallis
X79/LGA2011 is way too expensive to be considered as a mainstream option in
the consumer marketplace, and isn't even an automatic choice when shopping for
a workstation (since the Xeon E3s are so cheap).

On LGA1155, the connection between the CPU and GPU is now PCIe 3.0, but the
connection to the chipset and other peripherals is still running at PCIe 2.0
speeds and is only 4 lanes wide. Unless you have a motherboard that is
specifically designed to rob PCIe lanes from the GPU, all USB 3.0 and SATA 3
ports and gigE ports are sharing that 20Gbps link from chipset to CPU.

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mjg59
And, over two years after hardware first shipped, there's still no Linux
support for first-gen Thunderbolt from Intel. This is, to put it mildly,
disappointing.

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X4
20Gbps is only 2.5GB/s, sounds like I can't even saturate x16 PCI-Express lane
running at 252.08 Gbps (=31.51 GB/s) so much to "Thunderbolt"!

Correct me if I'm wrong.

The only reason that would make me buy a Macbook Pro is that I can attach
eGPUs to it (and hopefully eCPUs in the future aswell).

Sources: Google, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb3.0#Thunderbolt>

<https://www.google.de/#q=20gigabit++to+gigabyte>

EDIT: Added sources.

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flyt
There's your interconnect for the upcoming Mac Pro with a Retina desktop
display.

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jfb
... in 2014.

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GHFigs
Note that this post is talking about two different things: Redwood Ridge
(2Q13) and Falcon Ridge (2014).

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jfb
Good point. I was hasty in my read.

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paulsutter
Is there any reason a networking switch couldn't be built with Thunderbolt
ports (20Gb/s)? Or for that matter, USB 3.0 (5Gb/s)? Seems a cheaper way to
get higher speed interconnects for server clusters than using Ethernet. Sorry
if its a naive question, just curious.

EDIT: This would be for new installs, of course. You'd use a motherboard with
only a Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 port.

EDIT: I'd love to hear the "more complicated reasons", as your other
objections dont apply. In a compute cluster, you have short (within-rack)
cable lengths, and the owner of the switch is the owner of the cluster so
security is not an issue. Cost is a super big deal in a cluster. More
expensive interconnect means buying fewer servers, and that's just dumb.

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smalley
The more complicated reasons aside for the moment, thunderbolt is more or less
like an external PCI express connector (with some added goodness). As a result
you can access a lot of things via thunderbolt you probably wouldn't want
outwardly accessible (imagine a network where anybody could do a DMA on
demand). Then there are a number of other things, for example the protocol and
phy not being designed for 100 meter cable runs like Ethernet, no low level
networking support, the fact we have a reasonable and ubiquitous interconnect
for networks already.

There are alternatives for super high speed interconnects within a data center
though (think infiniband and cousins) or high bandwidth options for longer
distances (like fiber) etc.

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vidarh
Infiniband and 10Gb ethernet are both ludicrously expensive steps up from
gigabit ethernet which is what makes people look for alternatives everywhere.

Back in the day there were people doing IP over (P)ATA and SCSI for similar
reasons... Cable length is not necessarily a big deal - for a lot of
applications the appeal would be to use it as an interconnect between servers
in the same rack.

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rdl
10GE and Infiniband are actually not that expensive for HBAs now. Just
expensive for switches, but not _that_ expensive, and would be just as
expensive for any other non-blocking switch with that level of bandwidth.
Juniper EX4500 is probably the cheapest right now, at around $20k for 40 port.

$500/HBA and $500/switch port is cheaper than GE was at the same point in its
adoption cycle, I think. Might even be half that with discounts. Aggregated GE
is still cheaper and makes more sense for servers in most cases, though.

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coldtea
Hmm, and a rumor came out yesterday on Mac sites, from a source that "has been
correct in the past", that the new Mac Pro will be announced this month.

If that's so, could it have this? Check this comment again on April 30th!

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guywithabike
From TFA:

 _…production is set to ramp up in 2014._

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coldtea
"Ramp up" is not "start".

It's when they will be producing it in a streamlined way in large volumes.

Nothing stops them from producing a small run for something like the Map Pro.

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flyt
And the high cost of the Mac Pro, plus its target market's relative price
insensitivity, can help finance the early volume until the price comes down.

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asdfs
Does anyone know how OCuLink (similar to Thunderbolt, but by the PCI SIG) is
coming along? There doesn't seem to be much public information.

