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
now compare that to the 2MB/s transfer I get over wireless from my primary pc to my nas and you'll see why even at usb 2.0 the drive is still a faster solution for what I use it for.
odd to see them tout a thunderbolt successor by 2015 when we probabally wont see thunderbolt being used widespread until 2014 lol. And the article makes it seem like they aren't compatible.
usb successors are nice and all but I'd still like to see fiber become more mainstream in networking before an addon cable replacement.
your life sucks! hahaha!
Im guessing the successor to Thunderbolt will actually use fiber optics?
Loving the USB 3.0 speeds though :D
1./ 10G ethernet in practice at consumer prices
2./ "Real" wireless N and G that can truly deliver 54/300 Mbs. I dont know about you, but no matter what the connection says the theoretic value is... I get nowhere near those speeds. Nowhere near, and possibly due to...
3./ More, wider, wireless 802.11 channels. Depending on your country, there are 9-14 channels available. OK in 1999. But not in 2011. And because of channel "spread", use of one channels interferes with the neighbouring 2 channels. Even worse for 300N where the spread covers 5 channels.
A quick search using inSSIDer reveals 51 WLANs that my laptop can "see" from my apartment. So many overlapping, contending channels. And of course those 300N channels are hogging/stealing 5 channels at a time. No wonder my WLAN speeds are so lousy. We need at least 21 channels... CLEAR the radio space and put N+ in a new range. I HATE that the faster N is creating the contention and is blocking the already slow G channels. Big BOOH! to those technicians that designed N in the B/G space.
my neighbour takes up 8-12 and my other neighbours house is too far away for it too matter
54mbps.... is both combined upload/download, so devide it by 2 you get
27mbps max download speed or 3.375MBps... now of course when you download, you also need to upload at the same time to tell the other end you are receiving the information.
now there is also overhead to deal with as well such as wireless security.
this works out to be around 2.5MBps effective speed for wireless G... im fairly certain most people can get that from there wireless G connections within 10 meters of the devices.im also very confident you can operate wireless N in the 5Ghz range instead of 2.5 that B/G are in..... these other devices should have no effect.
Please, anyone wanting to comment further on wifi then do read up a bit and also try Metageeks inSSIDer. You'll gain a lot of insight! You guys are lucky to operate in non-congested airspaces. I invite you to try it here, where some of those N networks with boosters, are business networks with multiple people operating on it, and are consequently saturating the available channels.
The legacy 802.11 channel spectrum is a nightmare.
No trolling. It's not that hard to follow the guidelines. If you need to troll go play on gn.