New Thunderbolt Revision Features 20 Gbps Throughput, 4K Video Support 301
hooligun writes "The next-gen Thunderbolt tech (code-named Falcon Ridge) enables 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously in addition to running at 20 Gbps. It will be backward-compatible with previous-gen Thunderbolt cables and connectors, and production is set to ramp up in 2014. An on-stage demo with fresh-off-the-press silicon showed the new Thunderbolt running 1,200 Mbps, which is certainly a step up from what's currently on the market."
Adoption by Mass Market? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, will we see OEM Windows PCs come by default with Thunderbolt ports? Or is this another fantastic, magical, extraordinary Apple Inc. exclusive?
"20Gb/s" will bring useful 10GbE (Score:5, Interesting)
I do 10GbE drivers, and the previous generation of tbolt did not really offer 10Gb/s of usable bandwidth to PCIe devices, it was more like 8Gb/s:
If you recall, tbolt muxes PCIe and Display Port. On the PCIe side, the thunderbolt bridge passed 2 lanes of Gen2 PCIe through to devices. Since Gen2 is "5GT/s" per lane, you'd think you'd have 10Gb/s. But not really, as "10Gb/s" does not take into account PCIe overhead, which can be about 20% of the data transfer rate. So on the original "10Gb/s" thunderbolt, you were lucky to get 7Gb/s transfer rate from 10GbE NIC, once you also add in network protocol overheads.
Having a bus-constrained NIC leads to all sorts of weird problems when receiving data.. With flow control disabled in combination with bursty transfers, you often see far less than the 7Gb/s peak, as TCP hunts around to find the constraint and recover from frequent packet loss events.
It sounds like they've built the new part from 2 lanes of Gen3 PCIe, which should be good for ~16Gb/s of usable bandwidth. This is a very welcome change, as 16Gb/s should be enough for a single-port 10GbE NIC running at full speed, and a disk controller talking to a fast SSD or an external RAID array that can deliver ~750MB/s (bytes) of I.O.
Just don't try to use a bonded 2 port 10GbE NIC, or you're back at the bandwidth constrained problem.
Re:Adoption by Mass Market? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are laptops coming with Thunderbolt.
Sony's integrated one where the "mobile" mode is a standard Intel 4000 graphics for low power, but then you can dock it (via proprietary USB connector - grr...) which adds a Blu-Ray optical drive AND a decent GPU to the mix. Some company is actually making a PCIe enclosure so you can drive an external card through thunderbolt.
Heck, that's one of Thunderbolt's interesting applications - you can wire up a PCIe video card to it and have powerhouse graphics that suck down the watts, but easily unplug when you don't need it. Essentially, it's a form of hot-pluggable PCIe. And it lacks all the funkiness that USB adapters typically entail.
A thunderbolt serial port, while overkill, will present itself to your laptop as a NATIVE serial port - no messing with icky USB serial adapters that are iffy - this works just like a built-in serial port because it is using the standard busses your PC expects. As far as anyone is concerned, it hooks straight to the PCIe bus, and does normal PCIe things, and other than some minor hardware bridging, acts like it's plugged into an internal PCIe bus.
Only if you are ok with them being ass-slow (Score:4, Interesting)
Thunderbolt has 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 (this new version changes that to 3.0). 10gbps raw data rate, around 8gbps effective. It also has one channel of DisplayPort 1.1a.
So in terms of non-display devices, that means one RAID array of reasonably fast drives can easily overload it. I dunno about you, my RAID controllers usually hand of of 4-8x slots. 1 good SSD can kill half of that on its own. A 10 gig NIC is more than it can handle (look in the thread for a post by someone who implements those). In terms of display, DP 1.1a has enough bandwidth to get you 2560x1600@60fps. Knock on a second display at that rez? Well you don't have enough bandwidth anymore, so you are going to have to reduce rez, or framerate.
Or you could always, you know, have more than one connector and not bitch.
Seriously the one connector thing seems a little silly to me. A marketing solution looking for a problem. Yes, it'll work fine for the kind of stuff Apple likes to do: A laptop connected to a monitor, which then provides USB ports n' such, all over one connector. Ya. Great. Not really that big a deal.
It is not something, at least at present, that you can effectively hang a bunch of shit on one connector and get high performance.
Re:Existing stuff is Good Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
It exists so that users of portable machines can plug in high speed peripherals. Not single external hard drives, but arrays, fibre channel, external GPUs, etc.
Most users don't do that.
I feel you have misstated the case by way of apologia. Most portable machines powerful enough to be worth plugging in anything more than a single storage device have more than just one port, so users don't need to plug everything into one port. Using a single cable would be a cool feature, but of the vanishingly few people plugging arrays into laptops, vanishingly few of them need a single cable. Slightly more are willing to pay for the privilege and save a few seconds they weren't going to use anyway, but still not enough to justify the cost of the feature.
The simple truth is that you can build a whole storage server on GigE for less than the cost difference to buy a machine with thunderbolt and external devices. That means it's overpriced, full stop.