Thunderbolt On Windows: Hardware and Performance Explored 177
MojoKid writes "Intel's Light Peak technology eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. It wasn't a huge surprise that Apple got an early exclusivity agreement, but there were actually a number of other partners on board as well, including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital. On the Windows front, Thunderbolt is still in its infancy and though there are still a few bugs to work out of systems and solutions, Thunderbolt capable motherboards and devices for Windows are starting to come to market. Performance-wise in Windows, the Promise RAID DAS system tested here offers near 1GB/s of peak read throughput and 500MB/s for writes, which certainly does leave even USB 3.0 SuperSpeed throughput in the dust."
get out the hot glue gun (Score:2, Interesting)
Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents. Best of all its hot pluggable, no reset required, heck maybe not even detectable if you do it right by splicing into a users "video" cable, etc.
The spec even allows 7 devices in a daisy chain so you can get owned by an industrial competitor, and the local cops, and your own IT monitoring system, and the IRS, and the CIA and the FBI and MI-6 all at the same time. Fantastic!
Aside from reading, it should be trivial to create a writer to insert a root kit or keylogger into the system.
So much for the bad guys using it. The good guys can use it to bypass any DRM scheme. A little magic box plugs in, and watches memory as the decrypted file appears and is rendered. All that HDCP stuff is irrelevant, bypassed. Or, on the fly, keys are sniffed out.
If only they could have just multiplexed a USB over the displayport, or firewire, but no, they had to provide a root access connector that is now standardized across many devices. Oh boy is this going to be fun.
I honestly believe this is why rollout has been so slow, a frantic flurry of trying to figure out some way to patch the massive gaping goatse sized hole. Dev kits still not available, or so I'm told.
Re:Only problem is ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro which commutes with me to and from the office. It's a tad annoying to have to plug in six different cables every time I get to my desk and unplug them when I leave (which is a few times a day due to meetings). I've wished for a decent docking station; Apple seems to be averse to including a connector for this purpose, and the third-party solutions I've tried are as kludgy as one might expect. The addition of Thunderbolt doesn't have me rushing out to replace my laptop (obviously), but I'll be happy to have it when the time comes to retire this machine.
(As for why I have a MacBook vs. a Windows laptop... well, it's rather well built (and has survived a few drops to date), is Unix-y enough to allow me to develop on it and still deploy the results to our Linux servers, and has built-in grep and zsh.)