[clug] [OT] New Interconnect from Intel+Apple: Thunderbolt. 2*10Gbps. mini-display-port compatible

Brad Hards bradh at frogmouth.net
Sun Feb 27 13:44:27 MST 2011


On Monday, February 28, 2011 07:29:56 am steve jenkin wrote:
>  - combines display and data links.
>    - data is PCI-express extension
This is both good and bad - see below.
>  - uses 4 'lanes', each 10Gbps. Not sure if each bi-directional.
I understood it to be two lanes ("tubes"? :-)) in each direction.

> Wild card is volume production & inclusion in smartphones and
> Tablets/iPads.
I'm not sure it will gain much here, except if it already universal in 
peripherals or the video angle takes off. Most devices would be pushing to 
sustain USB3 speed, let alone 10Gbps. USB will be hard to displace for most 
purposes.
 
> The optical cables will be simple, but you'd expect, expensive.
> Overcomes a major limitation (distance) of both USB & Firewire.
> [At home, you can locate your fast filestore away from your Media
> Centre/home theatre. somewhere safe & relatively fire-proof.]
They have it working over copper, so I'm not sure optical will take hold, 
except in niche markets.
 
> For servers in small sites, will this punt 10Gbps ethernet?
Probably not, because of the security risks. Remember that its PCI-E, so it 
can (probably) reach into memory (like Firewire). That means that anyone else 
on the "network" can search through memory (extracting loaded files, keys, etc) 
and perhaps modify running code.

Brad


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