Thunderbolt

I recently read an article on Thunderbolt, which basically says that if Intel has their way, Thunderbolt (or Light Peak, whatever the optical version will be called) will eventually replace all existing ports and become the sole connector for all external devices.

I'm quite curious about the logistics - given how a typical desktop computer has 10-15 USB ports and high end chipsets have consistently had 32-48 PCIe lanes since PCIe was first introduced, how would this even work? 10 Thunderbolt ports would require 40 PCIe lanes, leaving nothing for discrete GPUs (which Intel is legally required to support), onboard controllers, etc., and there's simply no way to cram in 15 Thunderbolt ports, even if all other PCIe devices were dropped.

 

1 or 2 Thunderbolt ports should be enough because you can daisy chain devices.

 

that day will come in 2016 with current Thunderbolt's predecessor. Intel boasts 50 Gbps and by then we will probably have fully functional PCIe 4.0 already...

Beside, for laptop purpose, instead of having multiple Thunderbolt ports, they will just design a docking station

 

There are two reasons why this is a non-issue:

1) Not every Thunderbolt device will be assigned their own 4x PCIe lanes. Thunderbolt devices can be daisy-chained, and share the same pool of PCIe lanes.

2) Not every Thunderbolt device will consume the maximum bandwidth available to them. A single 2560x1600 display consumes ~11Gbps out of the 20Gbps available in a single Thunderbolt controller chip.



So hypothetically, if you had:
* A single laptop
* with 10 Thunderbolt controllers each connected to 4x PCIe lanes.
* Connected to 10x 30" 2560x1600 displays.
* Daisy chaining 20x SATA-3 SSDs all running sequential reads at 500Mbps

... then yes, you would hypothetically consume all of the available PCIe bandwidth, leaving nothing for GPUs. But you're not going to find that on a desktop computer, let alone a laptop.

 

I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but I heard that ultimately it wont be over traditional PCIe by the time it hits those 50GBps speeds, but fiber/optic boards on PCIe?

Someone needs to pay star trek some royalties for the optronic relay.

Anyhow was that hearsay or will it be 100% fiber end-to-end by that time?

 

My question, a bit more firmly grounded in reality, would be: When can we expect the first laptops to come with Thunderbolt, and when can we expect the devices for it?

 

Are you insinuating that the arrival of the new Macbooks are greatly exaggerated? As for the peripherals, at least one presently exists: