
Thunderbolt smokes USB, FireWire with 10Gbps throughput - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/thunderbolt-smokes-usb-firewire-with-10gbps-throughput.ars
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DuaineBurden
as my friend Chris Johnson said: What they don't tell you is that their claim
of 10 Gbps is faster than any cutting edge SATA3 chipset can handle. They also
don't tell you that Intel delayed the release of USB3 chipsets on their
motherboards until Thunderbolt (Intel made it) was ready so that the marketing
geniuses could tout Thunderbolt as a superior option because the advertised
speeds on the shiny packaging are higher. "Corporate collusion to force the
Apple lemmings to another proprietary standard" at its finest.

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ugh
All that Apple hatred has some funny results.

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bryanlarsen
Let me get this straight, have they replaced the 17Gbps displayport with a
10gbps thunderbolt port and call it an upgrade?

17Gbps fits nicely with the next upcoming standard display size: quad HD, AKA
4K, 3840x2160. It seems insane, but it's not -- it's retina display at 30" or
standard monitor quality at 80".

Sure, Quad HD doesn't matter now. But Thunderbolt isn't going to matter for a
few years either. Sure, Thunderbolt may eventually going to scale to 100Gbps,
but the baseline is now established at 10Gbps and few items will support more
than it, I bet. How many HDMI ports support 2560x1600 resolution even though
it's in the HDMI 1.3 spec? I don't know of any.

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radicaldreamer
DisplayPort isn't 17Gbps, it's rated between 1.62Gbps and 2.7Gbps. Just like
you mention about Thunderbolt, the theorethical maximum for DisplayPort is
17Gbps, not the actual throughput for devices that are out right now.

The actual throughput for the Thunderbolt port on new MacBooks is well above
what the DisplayPort on the older models was.

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bryanlarsen
DisplayPort handles 2560x1600 screens just fine, and that requires 6gbps,
(2560 x 1600 x 24bits/pixel x 60frames/second = 6Gbps) so I'm not sure where
you get your numbers from. 3 Gbps is required to handle full HD, and
DisplayPort obviously handles that.

Unless you're talking gigaBYTES per second. 2.7GBps is more than 17Gbps, so
your numbers are even higher than mine.

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radicaldreamer
Sure, but that's because you're using 4 channels to get there and it's
unidirectional. Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps per channel, so actually up to 40 Gbps
if there were 4 channels available (there are only 2 shipping on the MacBooks,
hence the 10Gbps bi-directional rating).

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dreamux
I can't help but feel this is a solution without a problem.

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JunkDNA
Well, for laptops and mobile devices, it's a nice alternative to a docking
station. Connect one wire into your monitor from your laptop. Then all your
stationary stuff: external disks, Ethernet, audio, and legacy USB devices all
connect through a hub on the monitor.

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alexgartrell
Now imagine how great life would be if they could also run power through it
(PoE style) so you could avoid plugging the laptop [directly] into the wall as
well. One plug and done is a pretty compelling reason to forgo [1] the desktop
altogether.

[1] fun (completely unrelated) fact: forgo and forego are both words with
pretty dissimilar meanings (to omit and to precede, respectively). I
discovered this only because I was unsure of the spelling, but it's
sufficiently surprising (to me) that I felt the need to share.

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sorbus
I will withhold being impressed until I see actual benchmarks. At this point
it's all marketing.

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zwieback
10W power to devices downstream!

What voltage does Thunderbolt run on?

