Intel Launches Light Peak Tech as ''Thunderbolt''

Now we'll start seeing external GTX 570's sitting on a desk next to your laptop port replicator wewt! only take your video card when you need it, imagine a 14" laptop that drops into a port replicator with a nice upper range pci-e vid card next to it. connected to your 42" LCD on your desk. Kewl, wonder what kind of power ratings it can support. (the 570 would obviously have external psu)

Wait, so if Light Peak (or Thunder Bolt) supports PCIe, and can basically function as a PCIe cable, then wouldn't that allow to you do stuff like have external graphics cards. You could even break a PC into multiple parts and have each part connected by this interconnect. Probably not practical or likely to happen, but it's an interesting idea.

I'm disappointed at the name change. Light Peak was a classy name. There's already an HTC phone being released called the Thunderbolt, keep LPK!

Also I hope that Thunderbolt isn't like USB and can only be inserted one way. Just imagine the amount of times throughout the World the USB plug has been turned around due to being in the wrong direction.

Note that the bandwidth of thunderbolt is only 10GB/s (equals 4x pcie)
It is not enought for memory, graphic card(need 8x, i think).
I hope it can uniformed the exterenal I/O port (usb, display, eSATA, eithernet...). So we do not need so many type of interface. CopperPeak (well thunderbolt) all the way.

Well for graphics cards or high bandwidth applications you could use dual cables.

Will it stick?
Firewire was great tech when it came out too, but no way I'm paying the extra to get firewire enabled devices. It's USB3.0 or eSATA for me.

So... what's avalible for Thunderbolt?

I really hope this takes off. I really hope they quickly upgrade thunderbolt and phase out the copper version of lightpeak. This could be HUGE. If they can fully incorporate fiber optics onto the motherboard, guess what? Game changer for motherboard design! Nothing needs to be in close proximity for speed. In fact, your components don't really even need to be in the same case! How does RAM mounted on SD cards sound? Or a hundred gig SD card utilized as your hard drive?

I don't know about your USB connections, but mine only go in one way. I have, however, plugged USB into an ethernet port quite a few times.

Probably should have kept the Light Peak name. It was already branded.

Thunderbolt is the nickname of a United States Air Force jet fighter.

20Gbps (2x10Gbps) is still low as far as external high performance graphics cards are concerned.

You can force the USB cable in the wrong way and damage the desktop side of the connector making that USB port unfunctional.

Does anyone know the POWER OUTPUT. For instance USB being 3mW or something what can this do? Can it provide enough to power a laptop completely?

I forsee a collaboration with Marvel in the near future. And judging from the way the port is shaped, it can only go in one way. It's square on one side and a hexagon on the other.

Could this lead to an age of PC parts that are like Hi Fi separates?

The "Amp" is the mobo, CPU and RAM - the HDDs, Optical drive, graphics, sound, network, monitor - all connected by Thunderbolt.

People said this years ago with USB but it never came about due to bandwidth issues but now we have a fat-pipe it may just get there assuming OEMs actually use the standard.

Seems more like a new pci-e port that is located externally instead of internally, since pci-e supports many different devices, the thunderbolt will support have a wide range of support also, (with the help of adapters which can be sold at high markups).

If it's like USB, then "10gbps" is more like "1-2gbps" in the real world.

USB was supposed to basically do "that" which you can run a video card via usb, audio card via usb, network car via usb etc.

compare that to the USB 2.0 external graphics cards. Not even same league. looks at the business side as well, they sell alot of those usb externals for business related functionality; to have 3 monitors on a laptop etc.

Hey JohnnyLuck...Go man,go,go,go...

Hey there's a "Thunderbolt towards a Light Peak"...

See if you can catch it JohnnyLucky...

Thunderbolt says 10gbps, while a normal 2.0/2.1 pci-e x16 lane can handle 64gbps. Granted no card will max out all that bandwidth yet, but its still far off from pcie. You might be able to run some lower end to more mainstream cards well, but definitely not highend.

Well all this gear is going into the apple macbooks you know & every body already knows that this will not be equal to the conventional desk top gaming pc...

nice save from Intel there, rename it thunderbolt to distract from, the fact that first gen cooper based devices will not be compatible with later gen light based devices. My prediction, no one other then Mac folks will buy into the cooper thunderbolt and wait for the real lightpeak

I'll stick with USB 3.0 for now.

Wonder if it will catch on

I agree Light Peak is better name. But it doesn't make any sense with the copper implementation which is why I think it was changed.

in benchmarking most high end cards the difference between an 8 lane and a 16 lane is very small, not even noticeable if you are playing the game. which means half: 32GBps these are actually 20GBps. this will be plenty for mainstream gaming. If your an extreme gamer, you'd have money for a dedicated one anyways or if truely extreme you got your SLI laptop. Heck, who's to say they don't support multiple connections. The real problem is latency, but if we are talking light here, than 20 feet away is still faster than 1 mm from cpu.

So you guys know that PCIe v3 gets 8Gbps per lane right? I mean, there's also the factor of interference that any cord brings into play with the length of travel, shielding, signal loss due to imperfections at the connection points, etc. It's hard to compete with a direct path between the GPU and main CPU. I'm pretty sure the people at Intel realize this, since the types of numbers they're throwing out are comparative to USB/SATA, not PCI.

This does still bring some interesting possibilities though, the PC industry sure does love their future in the clouds, so maybe we will see "graphics boxes" in the future in an attempt to kill off desktops.

Well it's about damn time Intel released Light Point. Though I feel it would have been better if they integrated the controller in the Cougar Point chipsets and released it with the 2nd gen Core series. Let's face it, Macs are really not worth $1k+ for the average consumer. Unless you're doing some serious video/audio editing, you can use a far cheaper PC. If Intel really wants this technology to take off, they need to integrate it into PC's. That's another thing that irks me. PC=personal computer. Well, last time I checked, Macs were personal computers. I guess that make's Apple communist if they differentiate. "Collective Computers" lol