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I hate articles like these: a sensational headline with a lack of technical depth. I gain nothing for having read it. Many details are false, irrelevant, or inf

I hate articles like these: a sensational headline with a lack of technical depth. I gain nothing for having read it. Many details are false, irrelevant, or information-free--for example, extremely new technologies are typically expensive at first. Thunderbolt has a major technical advantage with a protocol lighter in weight and superior handling of asynch communication. USB "beat" FireWire because it was cheap, and it was cheap because a lot of the logic was offloaded and host-driven. You can't get many gigabytes per second with that strategy. I'd be really surprised if you could drive, say, a very high resolution monitor off USB 3.0.

masklinn 15y ago
> I'd be really surprised if you could drive, say, a very high resolution monitor off USB 3.0. You definitely can't. But then again, you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable. Technically, you could implement a pretty crummy external video card driven by thunderbolt (may be useful for laptops, as additional oomph), but I don't think you'd usually do that. But if you want to go into technicalities, USB3's SuperSpeed raw throughput is 4Gbps (5Gbps theoretical max), 3.2Gbps expected after protocol overhead. That's 400MB/s (full-duplex) (note that this 64% effective throughput is an impressive progress over USB2, which rarely reaches 50% of its theoretical 480Mbps throughput). Thunderbolt is specced at 2x10Gbps (two channels per cable), full-duplex. And because it has a much lighter protocol (close to PCI-E) it should be able to reach a much higher efficiency than USB3. It also has a significantly lower latency, even at the end of a daisy chain, than USB.
- cynicalkane 15y ago
  ...you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable. No and yes, respectively... sending DisplayPort over the wire is a feature of Thunderbolt, not something you 'do with the same cable'. You can also theoretically drive a monitor with PCI Express, the other half of the Thunderbolt bus.
mrseb 15y ago
I am sure that there are many technologies that are inherently better than USB -- but it's not always the better technology that wins. (VHS vs. Betmax...) Don't generalize, by the way - if details are false or irrelevant, please mention them so that they can be rectified.
samlevine 15y ago
I run a 24" monitor running at 1920x1200 off of a USB 2 displaylink adapter. Of course video or games slow my computer if they're running on my secondary monitor. But it's fine for a web browser or a text editor.
icarus_drowning 15y ago
Not to mention that the tech has been out for about 5 minutes. Proclaiming the death of an interconnect that is this new is in and of itself pretty ridiculous.

masklinn 15y ago

> I'd be really surprised if you could drive, say, a very high resolution monitor off USB 3.0. You definitely can't. But then again, you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable. Technically, you could implement a pretty crummy external video card driven by thunderbolt (may be useful for laptops, as additional oomph), but I don't think you'd usually do that. But if you want to go into technicalities, USB3's SuperSpeed raw throughput is 4Gbps (5Gbps theoretical max), 3.2Gbps expected after protocol overhead. That's 400MB/s (full-duplex) (note that this 64% effective throughput is an impressive progress over USB2, which rarely reaches 50% of its theoretical 480Mbps throughput). Thunderbolt is specced at 2x10Gbps (two channels per cable), full-duplex. And because it has a much lighter protocol (close to PCI-E) it should be able to reach a much higher efficiency than USB3. It also has a significantly lower latency, even at the end of a daisy chain, than USB.

cynicalkane 15y ago
...you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable. No and yes, respectively... sending DisplayPort over the wire is a feature of Thunderbolt, not something you 'do with the same cable'. You can also theoretically drive a monitor with PCI Express, the other half of the Thunderbolt bus.

mrseb 15y ago

I am sure that there are many technologies that are inherently better than USB -- but it's not always the better technology that wins. (VHS vs. Betmax...) Don't generalize, by the way - if details are false or irrelevant, please mention them so that they can be rectified.

samlevine 15y ago

I run a 24" monitor running at 1920x1200 off of a USB 2 displaylink adapter. Of course video or games slow my computer if they're running on my secondary monitor. But it's fine for a web browser or a text editor.

icarus_drowning 15y ago

Not to mention that the tech has been out for about 5 minutes. Proclaiming the death of an interconnect that is this new is in and of itself pretty ridiculous.