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Where is Thunderbolt Headed?
- nailer 12y agoAs the article comments note, Thunderbolt is also not taking taking off because Intel demands all Thunderbolt peripherals have OS X drivers. Companies like Asus/Silverstone (and more who don't spring to mind right now) have created Thunderbolt GPU enclosures to allow laptops to do 3D work. However Intel won't let them go to market because they don't have OS X drivers, and Apple has no interest in supporting Thunderbolt GPUs when they cold be selling people additional Macs instead.
- abritishguy 12y ago[citation needed] The GPU enclosures have been held up by Intel refusing to license them but not because of osx drivers, there are licensed thunderbolt peripherals that do not have osx drivers.
- nailer 12y agoI read about it from a bunch of sources, which eventually pointed to https://www.change.org/p/intel-allow-silverstone-and-asus-to-sell-the-asus-xg-station-2-and-allow-villagetronics-to-sell-the-4th-generation-vidock-in-essence-allow-the-sale-of-affordable-egpu-enclosures https://www.change.org/p/intel-allow-silverstone-and-asus-to.... But there hasn't been an official statement about why they've been refused from Intel, so I can't link to it. You mention you still believe Intel has refused to license the hardware - what reason do you think applies?
- MWil 12y agoI'm confused too because they are already for sale http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=Store http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=Store
- nailer 12y agoThe final ViDock 4 is actually a ExpressCard to PCIe. You have to buy a separate Thunderbolt to ExpressCard. Having ExpressCard in the middle kills your bandwidth, and ExpressCard is way narrower than PCIE or Thunderbolt.
- pjmlp 12y ago> Apple has no interest in supporting Thunderbolt GPUs when they cold be selling people additional Macs instead. One of the reasons I don't buy Macs, even though I like Mac OS X, is the fact that only high end Macs have proper GPUs for serious 3D programming.
- m_mueller 12y agoAs a developer on Mac, I think game programming is one of the last resorts where WinPCs are clearly better and/or needed - except for Unity based programming maybe. VS is quite dominant in that area, isn't it?
- Stratoscope 12y agoVS dominates for Unity development too, at least in my little circle of the world. The developers I work with all love their Macs, but they hop onto Windows for serious Unity work, just so they can use Visual Studio with ReSharper instead of MonoDevelop.
- pjmlp 12y agoYes, because the whole game industry has been created on the home markets. The gaming community has a different mindset than UNIX or FOSS communities and Mac wasn't never good at games (at least in Europe). The rise of consoles happened in parallel with the downfall of Atari ST and Amiga. So eventually the devkits for consoles happened to exist only on PCs. Also the demoscene groups started to focus on the PC as well. It doesn't help that Apple, except for the Pippin and now iOS, never had a gaming culture. So you will never see a Mac game ring with subzero temperature cooling system and a pair of SLI graphic cards powered by their own power plant. :)
- mwfunk 12y agoYou are vastly underestimating the amount of work that would be required to support Thunderbolt GPUs on OS X. Its lack of support has nothing to do with any nefarious plot to make people buy more computers. Hot-pluggable GPUs are a Hard Problem and the alternative (requiring anything with a GPU to remain connected while the OS is up, and requiring a reboot if somebody wants to connect such a device) isn't worth doing, at least not for them it's not.
- MWil 12y agosearching Youtube for "egpu" pulls up a ton of Macs...
- nailer 12y agoI understand support eGPUs on OS X a lot of work, but you misunderstand my position: I don't care if that work happens or not: I'm quite happy using Windows / SteamOS for games.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y agoSource for your claim that it's not worth it for "them" to do? I'd counter by arguing that the computer brand that still to this day laymen consider "better for graphics" would find value in supporting a spec that's very unveiling discussed the possibility of external GPUs.
- metafex 12y agoDamn, a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe card with two ports costs ~55€. That would make for one hell of a replacement for 10G Ethernet. Double the speed and cheaper. Does anyone know how the linux support for this is?
- 4ad 12y ago10GbE cost is dominated by expensive switches, not by the cost of ethernet cards. This aside, Thunderbolt is not switched, so comparison is meaningless. There are very few opportunities where you use either Thunderbolt or Ethernet for the same application. The topology is very different.
- metafex 12y agoStill, for simple high-bandwidth networking needs it should suffice.
- sitkack 12y agoLook at used infiniband gear, you will get much better support (hardware, software, cabling). Same price or lower.
- kijiki 12y agoIf you're willing to leave the cisco/Arista/etc cocoon, NIC costs are actually the big ticket items. http://whiteboxswitch.com/collections/10-gigabit-ethernet-switches/products/edge-core-as5600-52x http://whiteboxswitch.com/collections/10-gigabit-ethernet-sw... $5595 for the switch, $699 for the software. You can split the 4 40G ports into 16 10G ports using splitter cables, giving a total of 64 10G ports: (5595+699)/64 = $98.34 per 10G port. A 1M cable is $30 from here: http://www.fiberyes.com/sfp-cable-cab-10gsfp-p1m-30 http://www.fiberyes.com/sfp-cable-cab-10gsfp-p1m-30 So $122.34 for switch and cable. I've never seen a 10G NIC that cheap per port. (disclosure: I co-founded Cumulus, who is behind the software in this price comparison)
- wmf 12y ago
- chronid 12y agoUntil thunderbolt stop being a proprietary technology, I hope it will stay where it is right now: ready to disappear into irrelevance when OCuLink (finally) comes out.
- threeseed 12y agoI can't see that happening. For one Thunderbolt sharing the DisplayPort connector is critical for many laptop makers who simply don't have the space to fit any other ports. And secondly Apple has a strong presence in the content creation markets which will be hard to overcome. But the biggest issue of all is that there really isn't any benefit for the mass consumer in any of these technologies. USB is more than capable for storage and many other needs.
- mmastrac 12y agoApple's strong presence in content creation didn't help Firewire. It's tough to see if their newer, stronger position might help, but I think we'll see history repeat itself and find that USB3.x will eventually support high-performance graphics. Alternatively you'll just see PC makers shipping 4k+-capable HDMI ports.
- chronid 12y agoI doubt it's even possible for USB3 to support high-end graphics. The bandwith for intensive applications is just not there, and not having direct access to memory (like with PCI-E) could be another obstacle. Everything is possible, sure, but... I don't see thunderbolt-like technologies to be an USB replacement, though. More like a definitive standardization of docks for laptops with interesting side effects.
- Dylan16807 12y agoI'm not sure if you're talking about connecting a monitor or connecting a graphics card. Graphics card is easy, USB is only a small multiple slower than thunderbolt, and as long as you have room for the textures 4Gbit/s is fine. Uncompressed 4k is trickier. It looks like thunderbolt 2 has barely enough bandwidth, and USB 3.1 has barely not enough. No reason to expect they won't have a 3.x that supports it.
- josteink 12y agoTo illustrate how bad a job Intel has done on the marketing of this technology, I for a long time thought that display port was a closed mac-only thing, and until today I thought the same of thunder port. If they want to increase adaptation, maybe they should consider marketing it more, and outside of sanfran's macbook-based hipster blogger circles.
- mullingitover 12y ago> and outside of sanfran's macbook-based hipster blogger circles. Man, this is a really tired trope. At the last conference I attended, ~9/10 engineers were running macbooks (and pretty much 10/10 engineers under 40).
- wwwwwwwwww 12y agoat the last conference I attended, ~9/10 of the engineers were using thinkpads and latitudes personal examples are worthless because of the ridic small sample size
- danford 12y ago>At the last conference I attended, ~9/10 engineers were running macbooks They're both tired tropes. There is a pretty reasonable mix of hardware and software run by 'engineers' and no where near 90% are macs. edit: https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-survey#workspaces/2496 https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-survey#workspaces/2496 That site has some pretty good statistics related to OS usage among programmers and some hardware usage, like iPod/iPhone, which I think is a decent indicator of whether or not these people own macs.
- vacri 12y agoI went to a security conference about a year ago, and not being a security guy, I was surprised to see about half the people using Windows. This being said, I am a little sad to see the prevalence of OSX-based laptops in 'hacker spaces', partly because I don't like Apple's practices, but mostly because diversity is one of the things that makes a hacker to me; the ability to make anything turn tricks. To see a monoculture starting to emerge is a little sad.
- MWil 12y agoThe only thing I would use Thunderbolt for is to add an eGPU to something like a Macbook Air or something else with an integrated graphics chipset
- sounds 12y agoThere are some who claim Intel is trying to kill eGPUs (external GPUs) and dGPUs (discrete GPUs) [1]. You're actually spot-on with the one killer use case of a thunderbolt connector. It's the same question dock connectors have also answered -- what's the need for a dock connector? A better GPU. Thunderbolt is simply Intel's way of killing a good idea before it gains enough traction to threaten their hegemony with USB. [1] http://semiaccurate.com/2012/12/17/intel-slams-the-door-on-discrete-gpus/ http://semiaccurate.com/2012/12/17/intel-slams-the-door-on-d...
- jws 12y agoWindows users are not going to like Thunderbolt until Microsoft fixes the Windows drivers. (Hint: Thunderbolt is 5 years old, the drivers still don't work. Don't hold your breath.) If you can't plug in a device reliably on an external connection it is pretty much useless. Maybe sometime after that motherboard vendors will stop hobbling the interface chips. Thunderbolt pretty well rocks on OS X. I wonder what the state of Linux is. And I mean really is. I still have corrupted MP3s in my library from Linux's firewire support. It almost always put the blocks in the right spot on the disk. (This was in the 90s or early 00s, must be better now, probably.)
- blueskin_ 12y agoNowhere, very fast.