Posted on 02/25/2011 11:32:05 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Back at IDF 2010, we wrote about Intel Light Peak nearing its eventual launch in 2011. Back then, the story was a 10 Gbps or faster physical link tunneling virtually every protocol under the sun over optical fiber. Though an optical physical layer provided the speed, in reality the connector and physical layer itself wasn’t as important as the tunneling and signaling going on beneath it. The dream was to provide a unified interface with enough bandwidth to satisfy virtually everything desktop users need at the same time - DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, USB, FireWire, SATA, you name it. Daisy chain devices together, and connect everything with one unified connector and port. At IDF, we saw it moving data around between an Avid HD I/O box, a Western Digital external RAID array, and simultaneously outputting audio and video over HDMI. Intel also had another live demo working at over 6.5 Gbps.
That dream lives on today, but sans optical fiber and under a different name. Intel’s codename “Light Peak” is now named Thunderbolt. In addition, instead of optical fiber, ordinary copper does an adequate enough job until suitably cheap optical components are available. It’s a bit tough to swallow that optical fiber for the desktop still isn’t quite ready for mainstream consumption - issues like bend radius and the proper connectors were already mitigated - but copper is good enough in the meantime. Thunderbolt launched with the 2011 MacBook Pro, and though the interface isn’t Apple exclusive, will likely not see adoption in the PC space until 2012.
Although Thunderbolt in its launch instantiation is electrical, future versions will move to and support optical connections. When the transition to optical takes place, legacy electrical connector devices will work through cables with an electro-optical transceiver on the cable ends so there won’t be any need to use two separate kinds of cables. The optical version of Thunderbolt is allegedly coming later this year.
Thunderbolt shares the same connectors and cabling with mini DisplayPort, however Thunderbolt cables have different, tighter design requirements to fully support Thunderbolt signaling.
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Although a cool name, like the warplane and drag race car, truth is, thunder comes in claps. Lightning comes in bolts.
It’s a marketing name...maybe chosen by Apple.
How much of a bump do they think they can get out of copper wire with this?
What do you mean by “BUMP”?
The funny thing is 15 years ago, Intel had an internal contest to suggest a name for the “586” which became “Pentium”.
My suggestion was “Thunderbolt” (rejected because it wasn’t TM-able)
A true story!
Hmmm...so maybe Apple chose the name.
It says up to 10 Gbps. But I like the multi-function tunneling ability in this day of ever decreasing device sizes. Now a laptop or tablet only needs two ports: Thunderbolt and power, optionally headphone and SD card reader.
This is great for Apple, the leading champion of decreasing port clutter. It solves their problem of USB vs. Firewire, since they both can be replaced by this. This has already taken up the video out port, and I expect Firewire to disappear first, followed in a couple years by USB.
Not nearly technical. They didn’t have PCs when I started working. But I do own INTC.
Is this going to help INTC? Just curious.
If it catches on as the next great standard. The last data connector Apple popularized was USB, and it caught on pretty well. There's USB 3.0 coming in the wings, and eSATA now to compete, but they both have their problems. Firewire is now dead. Technically, Thunderbolt is beyond all of them in terms of speed and capability.
...say above 10% of the total revenue?
Well, yes. Revenues and impacts to EPS, if that info is already being forecasted.
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