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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

How about a Thunderbolt version of the RED Rocket?

Jeff Kilgroe

Jeff Kilgroe

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OK, now that Thunderbolt is official, how about a Thunderbolt version of the RED Rocket? I'm not asking for an external box with a Thunderbolt connector to put the existing RED Rocket into. I'm talking about a very sleekly designed and more compact version.

It would have a cord with Thunderbolt port on one end and two SDI connectors along with DisplayPort and/or HDMI on the other. Draw it's power from the Thunderbolt port... It would probably require a lot more than rearranging the current Rocket bits into a new box. Seems it would need quite a re-design though. I don't think the current implementation could cool itself in a compact enclosure without a hefty fan and I'm pretty sure the current Rocket couldn't live on the 10W Thunderbolt output.
 
Great idea. And while they're at it, Red Station with Thunderbolt also.
 
Mark Phelan said:
Great idea. And while they're at it, Red Station with Thunderbolt also.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I see Red Station as the way to get around the power issue.

TB IO from your computer to Red Station. There you put a CF/SSD module to offload footage onto a harddrive/ssd for backup... and another module for the Red Rocket to feed it data and power.

Need more speed, stack on another Red Rocket.
 
(+1)
 
I'm thinking the other way, a thunderbolt pci express box would be more valuable. the idea of a rocket thunderbolt connection is great if you are just watching footage, and maybe transcoding footage to the internal drive, or the same fw800 drive. but I feel like coming up with a working proper chassis, similar to mobile rocket will do more.

a chassis with a rocket, and 4 port esata. that will give you rocket transcoding, connection to red station, and offload to 2 drives.

17 inch macbook pro with expresscard slot, that's more bandwidth to add to the mix.

fw800 can be used for a i/o hd maybe from aja, or another hd/periph.

just thinking that using the full 10g port with a rocket only might limit what the system can do more than enhance it.
 
Tom I like your idea there to have esata and rocket(s) attachable. Intel seems to feel that this is a robust port that can really utilize a TON of I/O bandwidth, so it'll be curious to see what kind of adapters or breakout boxes come out and how reliable they are. The only thing that worries me is how small the plug is and that it has no way to being secured like the DVI ports that has screws on the sides. So much bandwidth that could possibly be bumped out of place. Like the old Expresscard/34 slots that just kind of jumped in and out when you tried to eject them.
 
What if they had a Station sized Rocket card? Same form factor as a station unit, with the DVI connector breakout, and powered the same. That would be sweet. Or a full external unit built into a breakout box with a thunderbolt connector.
 
How about a 5 slots Thunderbolt expansion chassis for something like Resolve, so it can be used with macbook Pro? Imagine, just connect your Thunderbolt RAID, plugin 4x4000 GPUs and RR and voila, grading monster on a Macbook with 4k Thunderbolt video straight out of the box.
Edit:
Or may be this can be done in the next 100 GB iteration.
 
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Yes, a Station module that was a Rocket inside. That would be nice.

I think the reason I was just thinking of Rocket only via the Thunderbolt port is that the current RED Rocket's maximum bandwidth would max-out both channels on a Thunderbolt port. So we really need two Thunderbolt ports on a system to fully utilize all this.

But I would be all for incorporating an eSATA port into the Thunderbolt Rocket.

While 10Gbps per channel is a lot of bandwidth, it's still going to be easy to bottle-neck it with the types of solutions we're talking about. 10Gbps is 4X the bandwidth of an ExpressCard slot.

There is technically 20Gbps in a Thunderbolt port, but I'm waiting for full tech specs to be released before getting too excited. It hasn't been made clear yet if both channels are indeed fully usable or if one is preserved for displayport signaling. Thunderbolt supports the dual channels for PCIe topology, we don't know if Apple has done so. Apple is saying up to 10Gbps, so I'm inclined to believe the latter and for now I'm assuming one 10Gbps channel reserved for displayport and the other 10Gbps used for Thunderbolt PCIe.

If one is happy with RED Rocket performance in current ExpressCard expansion solutions, then that bandwidth could be increased by 60% and still have enough left over for two full speed 3Gbps eSATA ports (or 1 6Gbps eSATA) via one Thunderbolt channel.
 
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jake blackstone said:
How about a 5 slots TB expansion chassis for something like Resolve, so it can be used with macbook Pro? Imagine, just plugin 4x4000 GPUs and RR and voila, grading monster on a Macbook with 4k TB video straight out of the box.
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Hehe. You wouldn't get all that in an expansion chassis. It would slow to a crawl. Or you would need several TB ports to accomplish that.

One 10Gbps TB channel is the same as 4 ExpressCard slots. Or roughly the same a 1 PCIe v1.1 X4 slot.

A single Quadro 4000 GPU would be bottlenecked in a Thunderbolt expansion if you tried to really use it. For processing in Resolve, it seems to work OK for a 4000 in a PCIe X4 slot, but I wouldn't want 2 of them sharing that bandwidth, let alone with a Rocket.

If both channels in Apple's TB ports are available for PCIe expansion, then you could probably get away with a 4000 plus a second 4000 or a Rocket card. Possibly two GPUs with a Rocket since the CPU and RAM and disk storage would also be a bottleneck at that point.

Edit> if they scale to 100Gbit, then we could really load up. There's "only" 80Gbits of throughput in a PCIe 2.0 X16 slot.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Hehe. You wouldn't get all that in an expansion chassis. It would slow to a crawl. Or you would need several TB ports to accomplish that.

One 10Gbps TB channel is the same as 4 ExpressCard slots. Or roughly the same a 1 PCIe v1.1 X4 slot.

A single Quadro 4000 GPU would be bottlenecked in a Thunderbolt expansion if you tried to really use it. For processing in Resolve, it seems to work OK for a 4000 in a PCIe X4 slot, but I wouldn't want 2 of them sharing that bandwidth, let alone with a Rocket.

If both channels in Apple's TB ports are available for PCIe expansion, then you could probably get away with a 4000 plus a second 4000 or a Rocket card. Possibly two GPUs with a Rocket since the CPU and RAM and disk storage would also be a bottleneck at that point.

Edit> if they scale to 100Gbit, then we could really load up. There's "only" 80Gbits of throughput in a PCIe 2.0 X16 slot.
Click to expand...

We'll have to name the expansion box Lightfoot
 
Just got back from the Apple store swapping out my wife's 15" MacBookPro that we purchased on Saturday for the upgraded version. The Apple guy was telling me that Thunderbolt is upgradable from 10GBs to 100GBs, like firewire did from 100 to 800. Anyone care to shed some light on this?
 
Mark Phelan said:
Just got back from the Apple store swapping out my wife's 15" MacBookPro that we purchased on Saturday for the upgraded version. The Apple guy was telling me that Thunderbolt is upgradable from 10GBs to 100GBs, like firewire did from 100 to 800. Anyone care to shed some light on this?
Click to expand...

First-- careful with your units. It's 10gb/s currently (not 10GB), and should expand out to 100gb/s in the future.

I haven't seen official white papers from Intel yet, but from the sound of it the optical part of TB is slightly delayed, and when that is ready to go we will start seeing some faster speeds. I suspect that as the bus hardware improves over the next couple of years the speeds will creep up towards its theoretical maximum.
 
Mark Phelan said:
Just got back from the Apple store swapping out my wife's 15" MacBookPro that we purchased on Saturday for the upgraded version. The Apple guy was telling me that Thunderbolt is upgradable from 10GBs to 100GBs, like firewire did from 100 to 800. Anyone care to shed some light on this?
Click to expand...

The LightPeak tech will (they say) scale to 100G on optical cables in the next few years.
 
One major advantage a Thunderbolt Rocket would have over a Thunderbolt-PCIe chassis is in transporting. Just sent a MacPro interstate with a Rocket in it and the card needed to be reseated when it arrived - meaning a tech onset. PCI slots of all kinds are old technology and solid state boxes with Thunderbolt ports (think daisy-chain) would prove much more stable and robust.
 
Jeff, love the idea. Obviously the more ports the better. Interested in how well Thunderbolt daisy chains, because that could obviously have interesting implications for a Rocket box.

Does anyone know if a Thunderbolt PCIe card is in the works . . . ?

Anyways, +1 for a Red SSD reader with Thunderbolt. They did say those interface modules would be interchangeable . . .
 
Sean Rawls said:
Jeff, love the idea. Obviously the more ports the better. Interested in how well Thunderbolt daisy chains, because that could obviously have interesting implications for a Rocket box.
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Daisy chaining sounds pretty great, judging from Intel's PDF:

"A Thunderbolt connector is capable of providing two full-duplex channels. Each channel provides bi-directional 10 Gbps of bandwidth."

And

"Because Thunderbolt technology delivers two full-bandwidth channels, the user can realize high bandwidth on not only the first device attached, but on downstream devices as well."

So it's clearly 2x 10Gbps bi-directional overall, but for one device the max is 10Gbps bi-directional. It sounds like you could hook up a Rocket and a speedy little portable RAID box to the same cable pretty easily, and one device won't be stealing bandwidth from the other (although at some point you're going to be bound by other factors like HDD read/write speeds).

And I think I read somewhere that there was a 6-device limit for daisy chains, but I could be wrong on that part. Either way, throw a few TB ports on a laptop or a desktop and you've got an insane amount of I/O bandwidth available to play with.
 
I also just noticed that star topology is supported in addition to daisy chaining, so plan on seeing some hubs on the market as well. That would simplify things for device makers somewhat, as it would remove the need to put two TB ports on everything.
 
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