4 ms·

That figure is from an OEM. I was just shying away from the (magnificently over-used) phrase 'according to unnamed sources familiar with the situation...' Also

by mrseb 15y ago

That figure is from an OEM. I was just shying away from the (magnificently over-used) phrase 'according to unnamed sources familiar with the situation...' Also, look at the Matrox pricing! (Or the prices of any other Thunderbolt-enabled devices that are coming to market -- if you can find them; there are not many yet...)

orangecat 15y ago
Fair enough, still seems really high considering you can get entire motherboards for around that price. Also, look at the Matrox pricing! Sure they'll soak the early adopters, but that's not necessarily representative of the marginal cost.
- mrseb 15y ago
  No, true enough. It would be cool if Intel spoke out about the actual cost of Light Peak -- I mean, _can_ it be as cheap as USB 3.0, or is it inherently an expensive technology? FireWire controllers, for example, are still many times more expensive than the USB equivalent.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > It would be cool if Intel spoke out about the actual cost of Light Peak -- I mean, _can_ it be as cheap as USB 3.0, or is it inherently an expensive technology? It's going to depend what you do with it. Thunderbolt is basically an external PCI-E, with some additional brains to handle chaining and the DisplayPort signal. I'd say it's always going to be more expensive than USB3. Not necessarily by much, but with USB the vast majority of the work is really done in software and on the machine's hardware, which pretty directly controls the USB device. That's, in fact, why FireWire was so much superior to USB early on and could reach much higher data rates without straining the machines: the dedicated hardware meant almost no resources (outside of providing or consuming data) were required of the machine (I remember machines in the late 90s and early 00s having trouble playing MP3s in Winamp and driving a USB communication at the same time)
masklinn 15y ago
Wait, you mean early products implementing a barely released smart protocol are going to be more expensive than products implementing an incremental update to an existing dumb protocol? Surely that can't be.
- jerf 15y ago
  What's your point? Nobody's expressing mystification at the price difference. That's not the topic at hand.

by mrseb 15y ago

orangecat 15y ago

Fair enough, still seems really high considering you can get entire motherboards for around that price. Also, look at the Matrox pricing! Sure they'll soak the early adopters, but that's not necessarily representative of the marginal cost.

mrseb 15y ago
No, true enough. It would be cool if Intel spoke out about the actual cost of Light Peak -- I mean, _can_ it be as cheap as USB 3.0, or is it inherently an expensive technology? FireWire controllers, for example, are still many times more expensive than the USB equivalent.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > It would be cool if Intel spoke out about the actual cost of Light Peak -- I mean, _can_ it be as cheap as USB 3.0, or is it inherently an expensive technology? It's going to depend what you do with it. Thunderbolt is basically an external PCI-E, with some additional brains to handle chaining and the DisplayPort signal. I'd say it's always going to be more expensive than USB3. Not necessarily by much, but with USB the vast majority of the work is really done in software and on the machine's hardware, which pretty directly controls the USB device. That's, in fact, why FireWire was so much superior to USB early on and could reach much higher data rates without straining the machines: the dedicated hardware meant almost no resources (outside of providing or consuming data) were required of the machine (I remember machines in the late 90s and early 00s having trouble playing MP3s in Winamp and driving a USB communication at the same time)

masklinn 15y ago

Wait, you mean early products implementing a barely released smart protocol are going to be more expensive than products implementing an incremental update to an existing dumb protocol? Surely that can't be.

jerf 15y ago
What's your point? Nobody's expressing mystification at the price difference. That's not the topic at hand.