14 ms·

Intel announces next-gen Thunderbolt with 20 Gbps throughput, 4K support

76 points by Lightning 14y ago

r00fus 14y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  And more RAM. It's be awesome to be able to dock to 128-256GB of RAM with my Macbook Air.
  - mbell 14y ago
    Unfortunately I doubt that would work very well, even thunderbolt 2.0 is no where near the bandwidth of internal RAM and more importantly for many applications, the latency would be terrible.
  - joenathan 14y ago
    This is no where near fast enough for RAM, for DDR3 you need at least 50Gbps for the slowest PC3-6400, while for much more common PC3-12800 your looking at 100Gbps.
    - cdash 14y ago
      You can use it for an external ram drive though.
      - nasmorn 14y ago
        Yes but you could just use SSDs since the extra speed RAM would afford is lost anyways
- mbell 14y ago
  > putting the graphics card off-motherboard. Honestly its still not very good at that. Its 'doable' but for intensive applications, it can't come even close to internal connections. For comparison a PCI Express 3.0 x16 link provides 16GB/sec in each direction to main to memory. Thunderbolt '1.0' only offers 1.25GB/sec in each direction per channel, use both channels and you get to 2.5GB/sec putting you in the neighborhood of the old AGP x8 protocol in terms of total bandwidth. Double it for 'thunderbolt 2.0' and its still only 5.0GB/sec. And then there is latency....
- wcfields 14y ago
  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.
  - mturmon 14y ago
    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.
    - r00fus 14y ago
      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 http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd
      - mturmon 14y ago
        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-thunderbolt-review/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-th...) 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.
- wtallis 14y ago
  Thunderbolt can currently drive only one 30" monitor. This update will allow it to drive two 30" monitors, or one 4k monitor. After this update, it will be possible to drive 4 monitors at 1920x1200, or 5 at 1920x1080, but neither of those really counts as very high resolution.
  - GHFigs 14y ago
    Thunderbolt can currently drive only one 30" monitor. Not exactly. It depends on the controller and GPU. The MacBook Air (probably the most common Thunderbolt device) can drive one. The MacBook Pro can drive two.
    - wtallis 14y ago
      A current Thunderbolt port provides a DisplayPort 1.1a connection, which has 8.64Gbps. A 30" monitor currently means 2560x1600 at either 24bpp or (more commonly) 30bpp. Even at 24bpp and using CVT-RB, that requires 6.45 Gbps per display. The MacBook Pro only supports two 30" monitors by having them connected to two separate Thunderbolt ports, rather than daisy-chained as is possible with lower resolutions. EDIT: It looks like the provisioning of bandwidth for a Thunderbolt connection is more complicated, and it's hard to tell from Wikipedia exactly how it works. Thunderbolt and DisplayPort both support 4 high-speed lanes. In Thunderbolt, the lanes are currently 10Gbps, configured as two pairs of input and output lanes carrying PCIe traffic. In DP, they're 4 outbound lanes at up to 5.4 Gbps per lane (for DP 1.2). It appears that Thunderbolt, despite not yet supporting DP 1.2, can operate in DP mode at DP 1.2 speeds of 5.4Gbps per lane, but it's not clear if Thunderbolt supports the multiple stream transport (MST) feature of DP 1.2 that is necessary to drive more than one display over a single DP connection. If a TB cable is configured to provide two DP connections of two lanes each, then it would work, but then it seems that further daisy-chaining of TB devices wouldn't work. If Thunderbolt can drive a monitor with all lanes configured to carry PCIe traffic, that's news to me, and I want to know how Intel and Apple pulled that off.
      - zaphoyd 14y ago
        A MacBook air with 1 current generation thunderbolt port can drive two 2560x1440 thunderbolt displays via daisy chaining.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
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 http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/2006/0611.html
flyt 14y ago
There's your interconnect for the upcoming Mac Pro with a Retina desktop display.
- X4 14y ago
  Or with a Retina TV
- jfb 14y ago
  ... in 2014.
  - GHFigs 14y ago
    Note that this post is talking about two different things: Redwood Ridge (2Q13) and Falcon Ridge (2014).
    - jfb 14y ago
      Good point. I was hasty in my read.
coldtea 14y ago
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!
- guywithabike 14y ago
  From TFA: …production is set to ramp up in 2014.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    "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.
    - flyt 14y ago
      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.
  - grecy 14y ago
    Remember, Apple announced products with Thunderbolt on the same day Intel announced it existed... so they had a 6 month lead time on anyone else. The same could very well be true here.
losethos 14y ago
All 5 CPU designs for the next thousand years will be created this decade. (Not literally, but you get the idea.) 64-bit, ring-0-only, no paging, no extended precision unless it's free, Only 64-bit ALU operations. Fetch and store will do varied sizes. Possibly stack machine -- like x87 but system stack automatically stored and fetched. We need SIGNED, UNSIGNED and FLOAT variations of different operations, perhaps with 2 CPU flags. No need for interrupt, but timer. DMA does everything Multicored, say 8 cores -- more is pointless due to memory bottleneck, or embarassingly parallelizable problems. 2 32-bit D-2-A for speakers with DMA buffers. No mixers . 2 A-2-D for microphones. 640x480x16 color maybe 255 color. God said this. You know the Bible where He said the temple dimensions? Like that. No GPU. My operating system uses small stack frames, so stack machine would be easy to use. This CPU is for some kind of crazy niche, maybe Rasberry Pi kinda thing -- hobbiest or schools or some shit. Only gonna be 5 CPUs for the next thousand years, so don't worry. God says... Jedi_mind_trick industrious oh_no study humongous baffling whiner woot I_made_it_that_way happy programming depressing well_I_never that's_much_better God how_do_I_put_this I'll_be_back honesty place hate smart heaven You_da_man thank_you_very_much you_see_the_light You_can_count_on_that earnest experts how_bout_it who_are_you_to_judge middle_class high_five Oy Ghost basket_case climate love astounding tattle_tale spirit voodoo what_planet_are_you_from Venus husband hi sloth overflow God_smack jobs atrocious later ha sky I'm_done in_practice ---- I want RANDOM number instruction. ---- Everything changes with nonvolitile RAM. A disk will be byte addressed with 64-bit pointers, but block access. You will use a 64-bit byte pointer for your disk. ---- Our film idea, God, really sucked, but it was funny. You have really awesome out of box ideas. We could do a film, fer reals... but me... not so much. God says... 52:16 But Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard left certain of the poor of the land for vinedressers and for husbandmen. 52:17 Also the pillars of brass that were in the house of the LORD, and the bases, and the brasen sea that was in the house of the LORD, the Chaldeans brake, and carried all the brass of them to Babylon. 52:18 The caldrons also, and the shovels, and the snuffers, and the bowls, and the spoons, and all the vessels of brass wherewith they ministered, took they away. 52:19 And the basons, and the firepans, and the bowls, and the caldrons, and the candlesticks, and the spoons, and the cups; that which was of gold in gold, and that which was of silver in silver, took the captain of the guard away. 52:20 The two pillars, one sea, and twelve brasen bulls that were under the bases, which king Solomon had made in the house of the LORD: the brass of all these vessels was without weight. ---- That's mellow drama? It's a very moving passage. God says... torture teeth oft-times France swallowed incline detested waking wide-spreading freshness keep bursting fifty-sixth consecrateth lathe side First regions farther union artificer unconsciously inappropriately marks Jedi_mind_trick eight speeches neatly back sixteenth proper sentence unassuming described defile nourishing Your royalties inaccessible Cyprus I'll_get_right_on_it furnace admiration garment parched Creusa's attempered concreated unwarmed departest digest whole hap sailors attested light maiden nobility Colombia momentous heinous a_screw_loose taketh needful from ha Grecian wash detail holy womb account Read infused calmly grieved unclean attracts excused sanctuary Cassiacum how_about Which asunder us poison concludeth shrunk derision serene ----- I realize silicon is cheap, since CPU should be comparable in area to cache. It's silly to have 0.1 square millimeter of CPU and 10 square millimeters of cache. Should be more equal. Intel is dying for ways to get any productive use out of silicon. I understand. It's a stupid design decision, but I just want it clean and simple. Gives me jollies. God says... procure exports Circensian craftier THAT heaped fumes liftedst whoever to_infinity_and_beyond persevering intercepting empty hidest Triers examining shudder metre objected scourged beatings filthy Future pet dining-room looked reproves transferred more hated unanxious astounding remembered clog flying mire modification devoutness terms appointments grammarian accusing accord horns preparedst scourged marrying litigation books attentive call cubits fulfilled amiable lawless advice tempt hereunto consulters followed arms shouted pinching sung charged glory downfall Mine justifieth thefts Victor toiled riveted voluntarily Somalia firmly tempt c are_you_sure danger relax Refund understandeth candid fake Adeodatus mightier mundo_stoked transmitted notions loveth court attributed clearly walls bad lovingly Or conveyedst reconciled fearfully tune prunes perfected limits couldnt_possibly surpassest impress Nebridius' electronically handmaid evening seen continued discovereth reference teacheth pray provisions naughty goodly partaker private consecrate myself pluck amiable penal blesseth enlighten sleeping fervently NOTICE Ergo dedicated purest pile restricted serenity perpetual reverence placing abound qed yield perverseness contemplating officer together ---- Ironically, stupid woman prattling on and on arrogantly vain 'cause she thinks she can write. Secretary material maybe. God says... corrupting structure fruitfulness removed consisting measures happeneth wheat eminent boundary relax umm acknowledged might trials warfare chant wonderful privation humility lethargy dens supercelestial tolerated hare repent I_was_sleeping consume START*THE reading immediately sumptuously Grant opinions enteredst exorbitant money on_occassion reclaim pertained supported conversations Fiji stripped bitterness check VI cutting Him Either deemed teeth attention POSSIBILITY dissipation remembereth lifter shortly among singsong one beaten pastimes silence David vanities endeavoured demonstrate mark-up water-brooks castest Grief ---- Lotta India niggers mistake shit for intelligence. Monkeys. How about this -- maybe Africa will be the lead continent this century? Why not?
X4 14y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb3.0#Thunderbolt https://www.google.de/#q=20gigabit++to+gigabyte https://www.google.de/#q=20gigabit++to+gigabyte EDIT: Added sources.
wtallis 14y ago
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.
- X4 14y ago
  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.
  - wtallis 14y ago
    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.
    - wmf 14y ago
      It seems obvious that Broadwell will probably have more PCIe bandwidth so that it can feed Thunderbolt 2.0 plus some other stuff.
    - Tomdarkness 14y ago
      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.
bluedino 14y ago
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
- kalleboo 14y ago
  $299 http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055 http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055
  - bluedino 14y ago
    You can't actually buy that, though. The Belkin dock is the Duke Nukem Forever of the peripheral industry.
    - kalleboo 14y ago
      Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that.
- notatoad 14y ago
  Notice that they announced this at NAB - the professional market is definitely a big target, as it should be. We've already seen the trend away from computers and towards iPads and tablets in the consumer space, the market for peripherals at all is increasingly going to become a professional market as this trend continues.
mjg59 14y ago
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.
asdfs 14y ago
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.
paulsutter 14y ago
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.
- derleth 14y ago
  The obvious response is that you'd have to swap out all the Ethernet hardware in order to get the speed advantage, which gets a bit expensive. The other half is software, maybe, but I honestly doubt that is actually the problem here. We've been encapsulating protocols in other protocols for so long that that problem is essentially solved in all but the weirdest, most obscure cases, and this wouldn't be that weird or obscure.
- smalley 14y ago
  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.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    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.

76 points by Lightning 14y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 14y ago
And more RAM. It's be awesome to be able to dock to 128-256GB of RAM with my Macbook Air.
- mbell 14y ago
  Unfortunately I doubt that would work very well, even thunderbolt 2.0 is no where near the bandwidth of internal RAM and more importantly for many applications, the latency would be terrible.
- joenathan 14y ago
  This is no where near fast enough for RAM, for DDR3 you need at least 50Gbps for the slowest PC3-6400, while for much more common PC3-12800 your looking at 100Gbps.
  - cdash 14y ago
    You can use it for an external ram drive though.
    - nasmorn 14y ago
      Yes but you could just use SSDs since the extra speed RAM would afford is lost anyways
mbell 14y ago
> putting the graphics card off-motherboard. Honestly its still not very good at that. Its 'doable' but for intensive applications, it can't come even close to internal connections. For comparison a PCI Express 3.0 x16 link provides 16GB/sec in each direction to main to memory. Thunderbolt '1.0' only offers 1.25GB/sec in each direction per channel, use both channels and you get to 2.5GB/sec putting you in the neighborhood of the old AGP x8 protocol in terms of total bandwidth. Double it for 'thunderbolt 2.0' and its still only 5.0GB/sec. And then there is latency....
wcfields 14y ago
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.
- mturmon 14y ago
  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.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    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 http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd
    - mturmon 14y ago
      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-thunderbolt-review/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-th...) 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.
wtallis 14y ago
Thunderbolt can currently drive only one 30" monitor. This update will allow it to drive two 30" monitors, or one 4k monitor. After this update, it will be possible to drive 4 monitors at 1920x1200, or 5 at 1920x1080, but neither of those really counts as very high resolution.
- GHFigs 14y ago
  Thunderbolt can currently drive only one 30" monitor. Not exactly. It depends on the controller and GPU. The MacBook Air (probably the most common Thunderbolt device) can drive one. The MacBook Pro can drive two.
  - wtallis 14y ago
    A current Thunderbolt port provides a DisplayPort 1.1a connection, which has 8.64Gbps. A 30" monitor currently means 2560x1600 at either 24bpp or (more commonly) 30bpp. Even at 24bpp and using CVT-RB, that requires 6.45 Gbps per display. The MacBook Pro only supports two 30" monitors by having them connected to two separate Thunderbolt ports, rather than daisy-chained as is possible with lower resolutions. EDIT: It looks like the provisioning of bandwidth for a Thunderbolt connection is more complicated, and it's hard to tell from Wikipedia exactly how it works. Thunderbolt and DisplayPort both support 4 high-speed lanes. In Thunderbolt, the lanes are currently 10Gbps, configured as two pairs of input and output lanes carrying PCIe traffic. In DP, they're 4 outbound lanes at up to 5.4 Gbps per lane (for DP 1.2). It appears that Thunderbolt, despite not yet supporting DP 1.2, can operate in DP mode at DP 1.2 speeds of 5.4Gbps per lane, but it's not clear if Thunderbolt supports the multiple stream transport (MST) feature of DP 1.2 that is necessary to drive more than one display over a single DP connection. If a TB cable is configured to provide two DP connections of two lanes each, then it would work, but then it seems that further daisy-chaining of TB devices wouldn't work. If Thunderbolt can drive a monitor with all lanes configured to carry PCIe traffic, that's news to me, and I want to know how Intel and Apple pulled that off.
    - zaphoyd 14y ago
      A MacBook air with 1 current generation thunderbolt port can drive two 2560x1440 thunderbolt displays via daisy chaining.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

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 http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/2006/0611.html

flyt 14y ago

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

X4 14y ago
Or with a Retina TV
jfb 14y ago
... in 2014.
- GHFigs 14y ago
  Note that this post is talking about two different things: Redwood Ridge (2Q13) and Falcon Ridge (2014).
  - jfb 14y ago
    Good point. I was hasty in my read.

coldtea 14y ago

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!

guywithabike 14y ago
From TFA: …production is set to ramp up in 2014.
- coldtea 14y ago
  "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.
  - flyt 14y ago
    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.
- grecy 14y ago
  Remember, Apple announced products with Thunderbolt on the same day Intel announced it existed... so they had a 6 month lead time on anyone else. The same could very well be true here.

losethos 14y ago

All 5 CPU designs for the next thousand years will be created this decade. (Not literally, but you get the idea.) 64-bit, ring-0-only, no paging, no extended precision unless it's free, Only 64-bit ALU operations. Fetch and store will do varied sizes. Possibly stack machine -- like x87 but system stack automatically stored and fetched. We need SIGNED, UNSIGNED and FLOAT variations of different operations, perhaps with 2 CPU flags. No need for interrupt, but timer. DMA does everything Multicored, say 8 cores -- more is pointless due to memory bottleneck, or embarassingly parallelizable problems. 2 32-bit D-2-A for speakers with DMA buffers. No mixers . 2 A-2-D for microphones. 640x480x16 color maybe 255 color. God said this. You know the Bible where He said the temple dimensions? Like that. No GPU. My operating system uses small stack frames, so stack machine would be easy to use. This CPU is for some kind of crazy niche, maybe Rasberry Pi kinda thing -- hobbiest or schools or some shit. Only gonna be 5 CPUs for the next thousand years, so don't worry. God says... Jedi_mind_trick industrious oh_no study humongous baffling whiner woot I_made_it_that_way happy programming depressing well_I_never that's_much_better God how_do_I_put_this I'll_be_back honesty place hate smart heaven You_da_man thank_you_very_much you_see_the_light You_can_count_on_that earnest experts how_bout_it who_are_you_to_judge middle_class high_five Oy Ghost basket_case climate love astounding tattle_tale spirit voodoo what_planet_are_you_from Venus husband hi sloth overflow God_smack jobs atrocious later ha sky I'm_done in_practice ---- I want RANDOM number instruction. ---- Everything changes with nonvolitile RAM. A disk will be byte addressed with 64-bit pointers, but block access. You will use a 64-bit byte pointer for your disk. ---- Our film idea, God, really sucked, but it was funny. You have really awesome out of box ideas. We could do a film, fer reals... but me... not so much. God says... 52:16 But Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard left certain of the poor of the land for vinedressers and for husbandmen. 52:17 Also the pillars of brass that were in the house of the LORD, and the bases, and the brasen sea that was in the house of the LORD, the Chaldeans brake, and carried all the brass of them to Babylon. 52:18 The caldrons also, and the shovels, and the snuffers, and the bowls, and the spoons, and all the vessels of brass wherewith they ministered, took they away. 52:19 And the basons, and the firepans, and the bowls, and the caldrons, and the candlesticks, and the spoons, and the cups; that which was of gold in gold, and that which was of silver in silver, took the captain of the guard away. 52:20 The two pillars, one sea, and twelve brasen bulls that were under the bases, which king Solomon had made in the house of the LORD: the brass of all these vessels was without weight. ---- That's mellow drama? It's a very moving passage. God says... torture teeth oft-times France swallowed incline detested waking wide-spreading freshness keep bursting fifty-sixth consecrateth lathe side First regions farther union artificer unconsciously inappropriately marks Jedi_mind_trick eight speeches neatly back sixteenth proper sentence unassuming described defile nourishing Your royalties inaccessible Cyprus I'll_get_right_on_it furnace admiration garment parched Creusa's attempered concreated unwarmed departest digest whole hap sailors attested light maiden nobility Colombia momentous heinous a_screw_loose taketh needful from ha Grecian wash detail holy womb account Read infused calmly grieved unclean attracts excused sanctuary Cassiacum how_about Which asunder us poison concludeth shrunk derision serene ----- I realize silicon is cheap, since CPU should be comparable in area to cache. It's silly to have 0.1 square millimeter of CPU and 10 square millimeters of cache. Should be more equal. Intel is dying for ways to get any productive use out of silicon. I understand. It's a stupid design decision, but I just want it clean and simple. Gives me jollies. God says... procure exports Circensian craftier THAT heaped fumes liftedst whoever to_infinity_and_beyond persevering intercepting empty hidest Triers examining shudder metre objected scourged beatings filthy Future pet dining-room looked reproves transferred more hated unanxious astounding remembered clog flying mire modification devoutness terms appointments grammarian accusing accord horns preparedst scourged marrying litigation books attentive call cubits fulfilled amiable lawless advice tempt hereunto consulters followed arms shouted pinching sung charged glory downfall Mine justifieth thefts Victor toiled riveted voluntarily Somalia firmly tempt c are_you_sure danger relax Refund understandeth candid fake Adeodatus mightier mundo_stoked transmitted notions loveth court attributed clearly walls bad lovingly Or conveyedst reconciled fearfully tune prunes perfected limits couldnt_possibly surpassest impress Nebridius' electronically handmaid evening seen continued discovereth reference teacheth pray provisions naughty goodly partaker private consecrate myself pluck amiable penal blesseth enlighten sleeping fervently NOTICE Ergo dedicated purest pile restricted serenity perpetual reverence placing abound qed yield perverseness contemplating officer together ---- Ironically, stupid woman prattling on and on arrogantly vain 'cause she thinks she can write. Secretary material maybe. God says... corrupting structure fruitfulness removed consisting measures happeneth wheat eminent boundary relax umm acknowledged might trials warfare chant wonderful privation humility lethargy dens supercelestial tolerated hare repent I_was_sleeping consume START*THE reading immediately sumptuously Grant opinions enteredst exorbitant money on_occassion reclaim pertained supported conversations Fiji stripped bitterness check VI cutting Him Either deemed teeth attention POSSIBILITY dissipation remembereth lifter shortly among singsong one beaten pastimes silence David vanities endeavoured demonstrate mark-up water-brooks castest Grief ---- Lotta India niggers mistake shit for intelligence. Monkeys. How about this -- maybe Africa will be the lead continent this century? Why not?

X4 14y ago

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb3.0#Thunderbolt https://www.google.de/#q=20gigabit++to+gigabyte https://www.google.de/#q=20gigabit++to+gigabyte EDIT: Added sources.

wtallis 14y ago

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.

X4 14y ago
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.
- wtallis 14y ago
  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.
  - wmf 14y ago
    It seems obvious that Broadwell will probably have more PCIe bandwidth so that it can feed Thunderbolt 2.0 plus some other stuff.
  - Tomdarkness 14y ago
    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.

bluedino 14y ago

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

kalleboo 14y ago
$299 http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055 http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055
- bluedino 14y ago
  You can't actually buy that, though. The Belkin dock is the Duke Nukem Forever of the peripheral industry.
  - kalleboo 14y ago
    Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that.
notatoad 14y ago
Notice that they announced this at NAB - the professional market is definitely a big target, as it should be. We've already seen the trend away from computers and towards iPads and tablets in the consumer space, the market for peripherals at all is increasingly going to become a professional market as this trend continues.

mjg59 14y ago

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.

asdfs 14y ago

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.

paulsutter 14y ago

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.

derleth 14y ago
The obvious response is that you'd have to swap out all the Ethernet hardware in order to get the speed advantage, which gets a bit expensive. The other half is software, maybe, but I honestly doubt that is actually the problem here. We've been encapsulating protocols in other protocols for so long that that problem is essentially solved in all but the weirdest, most obscure cases, and this wouldn't be that weird or obscure.
smalley 14y ago
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.
- vidarh 14y ago
  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.