New Light Peak Laptop

[Paul Leeming]

The speed is great, i just hope it can power devices or else its another miss to me. Ive been using alot of USB3 bits on my mac for a couple months now, and I have gotten to the point where I can't go back to Firewire800.. or even Esata. That said.. stupid things people have done with USB3 still makes it a pain in the ass sometimes. ( like Lacie making the drives only work with their cards )

This makes me hopeful for a USB3 version of the RedStation and RedMag readers....

USB3, Light Peak (combined plug?) along with eSATA and FW800 for Mac people and those readers really will be futureproof!

Go on Jarred, you know you want to....

Cheers from Tokyo!

Paul

 

[Steve Dent]

To have a cheaper, remote SAN... that's where I see a technology like light peak doing well. Run some 30m optical cables to the back there, with no loss of latency - that would be perfect. Keep the mechnical drives in the equipment room, where they belong. But fibre SAN stills costs a half-Epic at the moment, because the controllers on the PC and raid side are so pricey.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Maybe lightpeak will become an "enthusiast" or professional format... in much the same way that firewire co-existed with USB.

Even if Light Peak really takes off, USB definitely will still be around for a long time to come - for things like mice and keyboards, low volume data transfer (USB flash drives) and so on...

 

[Andrae Palmer]

Lightpeak will be the standard.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

And, it's released:

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/

Bus power: Check
DisplayPort and PCI-Express: Check

So that means that eSATA and USB converters will eventually supported through PCI-E (like with ExpressCard) which is Awesome!

 

[Stephen Webb]

Looks like it will provide bus power and is compatible with USB3 and Firewire. Seems like a win all round to me.

 

[IAN SUN]

Yep this looks real good. Time to upgrade the 2008 MBP?
Naah, think I'll wait for some peripherals to adopt, like I don't know... RedStation maybe?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

One Thunderbolt port provides two 10Gbps bi-directional channels. That's pretty friggin' sweet. In case anyone hasn't thought about it, one Thunderbolt port has the same throughput as one PCIe 2.0 X4 slot. That is the same as one PCIe 1.x X8 slot, or the same maximum bandwidth usable by the RED Rocket.

Hey, Jarred. How about a Thunderbolt RED Rocket? And I don't mean taking the existing Rocket card and placing it in a crappy enclosure. I'm talking about an elegantly designed Thunderbolt peripheral that has the Rocket components inside as well as SDI and either DisplayPort or HDMI ports on the other end. I'll draw you a picture if you want.

I no longer have any interest in USB3, just so long as the Thunderbolt peripherals hit the market right away.

I'm thinking I might pick up the new 15" MBP to replace my old 17". However, I may have to pass. The ATI GPU was a crappy move by Apple. I understand they chose the best and most efficient GPUs available right now in terms of hardware specs... Sorry, nVidia, it's true. But the problem is that I, and many of us graphics pros, have software that relies on CUDA. ...Grrr. I wish nVidia would open up CUDA or that developers would start using OpenCL instead.

 

[Jean Déraps]

Have a look at this:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/intel-thunderbolt-a-closer-look/

check out the video demo at the bottom of the page.

Jeff, if I'm not mistaken it's the result of a lawsuit between Intel and nVidia rather than a decision by Apple which led to the change in GPU:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/10...uilding-chipsets-for-newest-intel-processors/

 

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

The speed is great, i just hope it can power devices or else its another miss to me. Ive been using alot of USB3 bits on my mac for a couple months now, and I have gotten to the point where I can't go back to Firewire800.. or even Esata. That said.. stupid things people have done with USB3 still makes it a pain in the ass sometimes. ( like Lacie making the drives only work with their cards )

Why do you prefer USB3 over e-Sata?

One Thunderbolt port provides two 10Gbps bi-directional channels. That's pretty friggin' sweet. In case anyone hasn't thought about it, one Thunderbolt port has the same throughput as one PCIe 2.0 X4 slot. That is the same as one PCIe 1.x X8 slot, or the same maximum bandwidth usable by the RED Rocket.

Is Thunderbolt Apple-exclusive?

Edit: Answered my question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/10...uilding-chipsets-for-newest-intel-processors/

Hmm... Perhaps. Makes you wonder though... Would Intel not want Apple and it's other tier-1 integrators using nVidia products due to a lawsuit and would request that they purchase from a direct competitor that also plays in the CPU space (AMD)? Not sure I buy that. Not sure that would even be legal. The lawsuit is more than 2 years old and deals with host chipsets, not GPUs. It was settled in Intel's favor and once again has nothing to do with GPUs. Apple has used nVidia GPUs in their notebooks up until yesterday.