For all phone aficionados, I'm not talking about the hTC 4G LTE phone. I'm talking about the 10Gbps copper version of the 20Gbps optical transport standard called LightPeak.
We went to buy a spanking new MacBook Pro the other day at the Apple Store. While I'm there - I must admit that God did not give me enough strength to resist buying the first gen iPAD. Not only that, God made us fight over the 1 iPAD we first bought, enough to make us buy another one. Now - each one of us has one. Oh well...
So, this MacBook Pro - amazing piece of technology, could do with a better keyboard - had the brand new Thunderbolt port. Remember this symbol?
Now - I started asking the Apple geeks at the store, if there are any accessories available. I knew the answer, but what surprised me was that the TB cable was not included in the box and you can't buy it anywhere. No Thunderbolt cable is available today. This was confusing to say the least.
The idea behind TB we were told was to be able to transfer atleast 2x faster than USB. However, it seemed more like a strategy to not put HDMI. The only thing you can do with the TB port today is to add a DisplayPort monitor to it. There were rumors after TB was released that the USB IF did not allow Apple to use the USB footprint, but IMO thats a bunch of bologna. Apple just wanted a better display port. If you can add USB 3.0 speeds, and release something before Intel supports it natively, why not work with some group of people inside Intel to create this science project. Kudos to the VP at Intel who negotiated to keep some of this credit - allowing Intel to brag about LightPeak in IDF 2009.
The TB architecture inside a MAC is like this:
For a 3D picture of the same:
It is actually quite nice. I personally am not a big fan of HDMI. DisplayPort - is a niche, but if you add it with fast transfer speeds, the resulting technology does have a potential to revolutionize. However, I'm not sure it is being promoted right. First, it comes at a time where a simple Thunderbolt search on the web will give you the hTC phone. Second, no-one can use it right now. Third - for system designers, it is not "open".. Intel still owns the rights to the Thunderbolt accessories. I've heard that this expires by this quarter - but who knows what happens next.
In the meantime, the USB 3.0 train has picked up speed. HP announced that they'll not put TB, Lenovo is backing USB 3.0 and Dell has USB 3.0 in their roadmap. The article that caught my eye recently talked about Thunderbolt being dead in the water. I am not this pessimistic, but it does not seem to me that Apple is doing anything differently from the Firewire days.. Still remember the first iPOD release video by Steve Jobs where he said - "And guess what, this iPOD comes with a FIREWIRE port". Sigh.
http://techgage.com/news/is_intels_thunderbolt_dead_in_the_water/
