LightPeak vs ThunderBolt

[HunkyLuke]

The other day when Apple announced its latest MacBook Pro releases, Intel also officially released ThunderBolt, the new cable connection option that puts USB and FireWire to shame with upto 10GBbps speeds.

Thunderbolt is a 10Gbit/s, bi-directional, dual channel, copper link containing an Intel controller chip and supporting two protocols: DisplayPort and PCIe. Intel says a high-definition movie can be transferred across it in less than 30 seconds

But what happened to LightPeak? Intel's original name for the project was changed when PC manufacturers demanded a cheaper, non-optical option. Intel caved to pressure and replaced its fiber-optics based LightPeak to an electrical version, and renamed it Thunderbolt.

The rub is that the current Thunderbolt technology - which debuted today on Apple Mac Pros – only works across a 3 metre cable. But according to Yogec and Ziller, Intel will eventually offer an optical cable that will plug into the existing on-system hardware, transferring data across much larger distances....And eventually, the company says, it hopes to introduce an all-optical setup, where that optical transceiver sits on the PC.

According to Intel, the electrical version of the technology provides exactly the same speed as the optical version. The only difference is the length of the cable – and cost.

Quotes were provided from The Register articles.

[PornGuy]

It was good to see that announced but wont really matter for most people just yet.

[x0pa]

ya where do i find that NAS i see plugged into thunderbolt the video i saw was pretty impressive they had i believe a big storage array with 1080p clips being stitched together in final cut pro being outputted in 1080p on a big mac monitor i believe it was connected to the same thunderbolt port im not sure if it was split or how that worked but it was pretty cool - but if im not doing that kind of work what do i need it for?

maybe a camera that has thunderbolt and a chatroulette site? heheheheh