Friday, April 29th 2011
Thunderbolt Successor to Boast of 50 Gbps Bandwidth
For the greater part of the last decade, PC device connectivity was limited to the 480 Mbps bandwidth of USB 2.0. The pressing need for more bandwidth to run external hard drives and disk racks was alleviated by eSATA, but eSATA lacked the versatility of USB. After quite some delay, came the next big version of USB, the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, with its massive 5 Gbps bandwidth, plenty for fast and capacious flash drives, and external storage devices.
There was, however, a potential bottleneck lurking with running SSD-based RAID boxes in USB 3.0, as many SATA 6 Gbps SSDs are getting close to the bandwidth limit of USB 3.0. There has also been the need for an interconnect faster than USB 3.0 for high-bandwidth applications such as lossless ultra high definition video streaming in professional environments, and hence came Thunderbolt, which is a copper-electric variant of a fiber-optic interconnect Intel had been working on, codenamed Light Peak. The successor to Thunderbolt is reportedly already under development at Intel Labs.
Thunderbolt delivers 10 Gbps of bandwidth over copper wire, but there's no guaranteeing its market longevity with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth with applications in the future. As early as 2015, Intel will have developed a new device interconnect standard to replace Thunderbolt. The new interconnect will be able to deliver a [currently] mind-boggling bandwidth of 50 Gbps over distances as long as 100 m. The announcement came from Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Thunderbolt is able to make use of its 10 Gbps bandwidth to drive high-bandwidth video encoding applications in environments with external storage, as well as connect high-resolution displays over the DisplayPort protocol. The future 50 Gbps interconnect will build on Thunderbolt's applications by upscaling the bandwidth. There is, however, no definitive word on whether the future interconnect will maintain any kind of compatibility with Thunderbolt. "We see them as complementary. It's the evolution of these connectors and protocols as they move forward," Demain said.
It is likely that Intel will have developed silicon photonics to a greater degree by 2015. At least it should be able to put optical transmitter and receiver into a single chip, small enough to be fitted into smartphones and tablets.
Source:
PCWorld
There was, however, a potential bottleneck lurking with running SSD-based RAID boxes in USB 3.0, as many SATA 6 Gbps SSDs are getting close to the bandwidth limit of USB 3.0. There has also been the need for an interconnect faster than USB 3.0 for high-bandwidth applications such as lossless ultra high definition video streaming in professional environments, and hence came Thunderbolt, which is a copper-electric variant of a fiber-optic interconnect Intel had been working on, codenamed Light Peak. The successor to Thunderbolt is reportedly already under development at Intel Labs.
Thunderbolt delivers 10 Gbps of bandwidth over copper wire, but there's no guaranteeing its market longevity with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth with applications in the future. As early as 2015, Intel will have developed a new device interconnect standard to replace Thunderbolt. The new interconnect will be able to deliver a [currently] mind-boggling bandwidth of 50 Gbps over distances as long as 100 m. The announcement came from Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Thunderbolt is able to make use of its 10 Gbps bandwidth to drive high-bandwidth video encoding applications in environments with external storage, as well as connect high-resolution displays over the DisplayPort protocol. The future 50 Gbps interconnect will build on Thunderbolt's applications by upscaling the bandwidth. There is, however, no definitive word on whether the future interconnect will maintain any kind of compatibility with Thunderbolt. "We see them as complementary. It's the evolution of these connectors and protocols as they move forward," Demain said.
It is likely that Intel will have developed silicon photonics to a greater degree by 2015. At least it should be able to put optical transmitter and receiver into a single chip, small enough to be fitted into smartphones and tablets.
39 Comments on Thunderbolt Successor to Boast of 50 Gbps Bandwidth
apple mac fanbois to death
On topic : sounds very appealing and I'd love to see those sort of speeds sooner.
More on topic, does anyone know if this has the latency response to replace sata? Cause even sata 6 woefully slow. We're only a few ssd gens away from a 10x speed bump and sata specifications are updated far too infrequently.
I think I'll file Light Peak in the same pile as Larrabee. Big on talk: short on delivery.
In that case USB & Ethernet (with PoE) will remain quite relavent because of their ability to power the device across the cable.
OT: Looks like Intel is with the illuminati, LOL!:roll:
even esata isn't used for anything other than storage. they catered to different segments so
it's no wonder usb stuck around.
speed is not the most important factor believe it or not. overhead, component cost, market
ubiquity. simply being around long enough allows a technology to become (a) standard.you're talking as though usb 2.0 is not sufficient in speed for 90% of users, which it still is.
sure faster is better, but most people don't care. the majority of consumers will look at
2.0-3.0 as a worthless upgrade, especially until devices start making use of it. then they
have to buy new external devices, to gain ANY benefit from 3.0... I know you are the
resident hardware dude... but i don't think 2.0 is so far over-extended, except in a strictly
technological sense.
if it were measured by what is possible, yes it's inordinately slow. but i highly doubt 99% of
users/consumers are using their usb 2.0 hard drives, and being put off by the speed. i'm sure
they'd be happy with faster, but insufficient to me means being to poor for use, which i don't
agree that it is for most users.
i don't think they think much about it, it just is.
It took too long before USB 3.0 came to be, and established some sort of parity with internal storage standard prvealent for the day. (USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps).I don't know, but certainly a LOT of people needed to transfer over 40 MB/s in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 (when there was still no USB 3.0 in sight, and when hard drives would easily cross 100 MB/s).
who knows, intel breaks and makes
I'm referring to the latter.
"I'm 1st to comment" and "Intel your pricing Sucks" kinda post..
but ended up with random non-sensical gibberish..
what really made my day was reading you guys reply, top class +1000