Thunderbolt vs. SuperSpeed USB 327
Lucas123 writes "When it comes to performance, power and size, external I/O interconnect Thunderbolt handily beats SuperSpeed USB, but in the one critical category — ubiquity — it has an almost impossible uphill battle. Thunderbolt has a maximum 10Gbps signaling rate to SuperSpeed USB's 6Gbps and it offers more than twice the power to devices. To date, however, Apple is the only systems manufacturer to adopt Thunderbolt, and it has done so as an additional device connectivity port, keeping SuperSpeed USB on its computers. No other systems manufacturer has committed to Thunderbolt. In contrast, SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, with numbers continuing to grow."
Acer and Asus signed up for Thunderbolt (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not better though (Score:4, Interesting)
It is different, hence why Intel makes both (Thunderbolt is Intel's not Apple's). Thunderbolt is basically just an external PCIe bus. While that has a benefit of great speed and low latency, it has drawbacks. The client device has to be more complex (and thus expensive) since it needs a PCIe controller on it. Also a device can hose your system, being PCIe it has DMA and can write or read any memory.
USB is much simpler. Slave devices need little logic to handle it. Also it is handled through the CPU which, while slower, is safer meaning an errant device can't as easily trash your system.
Maximum cable length (Score:5, Interesting)
Thunderbolt is interesting because of the potential maximum cable length. The current cupper cables are limited to 3 meters, but once optical cables are available, "10s of meters [tuaw.com]" will be possible.
Since you can run both display, keyboard and mouse over one cable natively, this means that you can put your computer with its noisy fans into the basement, use a single thunderbolt cable, and just have an extremely thin client at your workstation.
Re:TFA (-1, wrong) (Score:4, Interesting)
No, because they are active. That's what will allow people to transparently switch to optical cables in a few years. You won't have to replace any of your equipment, the cables handle that.
This is somewhat stupid though. USB has moved into hard drives and such, but it aims at the low end of the market. Mice, keyboard, etc. up through hard drives and scanners. On the other hand, Thunderbolt aims at the top of the market. It aims at displays, large RAID arrays down through hard drives and scanners. Thunderbolt is basically PCIe in a cable. This isn't an either-or. No one in their right mind would ever make a Thunderbolt mouse or USB SAN, there is no reason to think both ports won't be on computers in a few years.
So is the question "What will people use for connecting external storage in 2 years"? Because that's basically the only question people ever argued over with USB vs. FireWire. I'd say the answer is "USB for most, ThunderBolt for those who really care about performance".
Remember that since ThunderBolt is faster and PCIe, you can make bridge to let you plug USB SuperSpeed stuff into Thunderbolt ports, just like Apple's Thunderbolt monitors have USB2 and FireWire bridge chips.