[Crimson]

Developed by Intel and Apple, it's '20 times faster than the theoretical limit of USB 2.0, 12 times faster than FireWire 800, and twice as fast as USB3. According to Intel, however, the 10Gbps isn't just a theoretical peak speed, but usable bandwidth'.

You can 'sync 64GB of music to a portable device in about a minute'.

 

'The full list of those planning Thunderbolt support in future products include AJA, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, Universal Audio, LaCie, and Western Digital'.

Seems it has an audiovisual following in the works.

Read more here.

[Mike Nomad]

This is great news. With more throughput and a smaller connector, can we _please_ get devices that need only one or two kinds of connectors?

[jhm731]

Ordered a 13" with 128gb SSD today.

[nathanm]

Awesome…I hope Apple comes out with a backup hard drive called the Thunderbucket.

[Cheerwino]

Thunder! Thunder! Thunder!

[Pez]

Smart that they combined it with the DVI port, but it could cause issues if 3rd party vendors don't properly implement daisy-chaining on their products like so many promised to do with HDMI/HDCP standards, but failed miserably at actually doing. I hate HDCP standard so much it makes my head spin. None of that please Intel!

[jqp]

Well I wouldn't get too excited about this new technology...unless you have been excited about firewire and displayport all these years. Unless you can get a reasonably priced external thunderbolt drive you will probably never use thunderbolt on your new Macbook Pro. Maybe in the next generations of Macbooks and other products.

I actually have firewire and displayport devices. What they offer is superior data and video transfer, but I just don't get that much benefit from them, considering that actually taking advantage of these technologies means buying other more-expensive-than-average gear.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept. But Displayport can already carry audio and USB in addition to large-bandwidth video over that technology. But who does this? I have an expensive monitor that has Displayport. If I buy two more expensive monitors I can have a huge NASA-level display setup using Eyefinity. I have a few video cards that have displayport, one high-end. I also have firewire external drives, and all my motherboards have firewire. But in reality, DVI-D is basically all I use and also eSata is a more practical alternative to firewire in many cases.

I would bet that 1% or less of the MacBook Pro users (media professionals) will use Thunderbolt in the next year. I mean you will have to go out of your way to use the technology.
   
If Apple really wanted to help us out, they would allow us to connect our iPhones and IPads to our Macbooks and iMacs and not just for buying overpriced lower-quality media 


What is really more exciting about these Macbooks is that they have the second generation Intel core-i processors known as Sandy Bridge. These processors are significantly faster and much faster at processing video (hardware video transcoding), as in from your camcorder to DVD or Blu-Ray. In act faster for video processing than any current i-5 or i-7 PC! The technology is called QuickSync and this is what they should be trumpeting from the rooftops more than Thunderbolt. But I guess for some reason the Intel-Apple deal causes them to take this approach.

I may finally pick one of these Macbook Pros up, but not because of Thunderbolt. I would get one with a 128GB SSD which would do much more for performance, and hope to get a reasonably priced Thunderbolt external drive to write data to. But a firewire drive would work just fine.

[Pez]

Agreed, it's sort of a 1st move to get the ball rolling on this new standard. It will be priced out of the ballpark on most peripherals for the first few years for no other reason than it's new. I used an external HD on my older MBP with esata via a pc card attachment which was great, just as good as an internal drive, but not a lot of people do that kind of stuff. I think this will be big in 4-5 years especially since Apple adopted it, they are very cautious with adopting new standards. They never jumped on the HDMI train with their computing products (the Apple TV has one, but that's a different story) because HDMI standard sucks big time. They've gotten a lot of flack for it over the years, but I personally think they made the right choice.

Now all this may change if this is the... MYSTERY PORT that is supposed to be on the iPad. 

[jqp]

Well if the new iPad has Thunderbolt that would be revolutionary!


So do the older Macboooks have a cardslot? I didn't remember that....

[Pez]

ya the pre-unibody 15" and 17" both have a slot. It was great. Now you have to get a 17" to get one. But with thunderbolt it eliminates the need for one IMO. It would have been great to have one on the 11" MBA I'm typing on now.

[Cheerwino]

Well if the new iPad has Thunderbolt that would be revolutionary!


So do the older Macboooks have a cardslot? I didn't remember that....

Yeah, like Pez said, I think that's what that "mystery port" on the leaked iPad2 cases will be (which is definitely cool). Putting it on the iPad2 and future iPhones will certainly boost Thunderbolt in the market.

The main boost would be reasonably priced peripherals (unlike early Firewire stuff). I'm also really curious about what kind of peripherals Thunderbolt could power. For example, could it power a DAC? SSD drive or even standard hard drive?

[Russell Dawkins]

I understand it can provide 10 watts of power.

[jtwrace]

You can see the chip here http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody-Early-2011-Teardown/4990/2

Step #11

[Don_S]

Yuck,  A MacBook autopsy. 

You can see the chip here http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody-Early-2011-Teardown/4990/2

Step #11

[jqp]

Went to the Apple Store today to check out the new MacBook Pros and to see what they knew about Thunderbolt.

Wow the 17" is as big as a house! I have a 13" Studio XPS which is similar to a previous gen 13" Macbook Pro, and I really like the size. Even a 15" MacBook Pro seems huge.

I did see the little lightning bolt symbol on the Thunderbolt port, which is simply a mini-diplayport jack conneccted to the thunderbolt chip. I asked about any education they had gotten on Thunderbolt and also on the Sandy Bridge architecture of the new generation core-i chips. Little and little...

He indicated that if I needed a Thunderbolt cable they would sell me a mini-displayport cable since currently you would just use that port to connect to the Cinema display.

I did see my first Thunderbolt peripheral online, and just as I suspected, it was from LaCie. It is an external drive of 2x250GB SSDs, striped into one 500GB volume (raid 0). So it will be fast, about the only thing that is justifiable for Thunderbolt bandwidth.





I assume it will be about $699, and will have a second port for daisy-chaining.

[jqp]

Also here are some features from Intel's page on Thunderbolt
    * Dual-channel 10 Gbps per port
    * Bi-directional
    * Dual-protocol (PCI Express* and DisplayPort*)
    * Compatible with existing DisplayPort devices
    * Daisy-chained devices
    * Electrical or optical cables
    * Low latency with highly accurate time synchronization
    * Uses native protocol software drivers
    * Power over cable for bus-powered devices

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm

The mini-displayport cable has 20 wires.