Acer silences Thunderbolt Intel's Thunderbolt I/O protocol looks just a little less likely to threaten USB's status as the world's preferred way of connecting stuff to computers, after Acer decided it can't be bothered using it in PCs any more. The Taiwanese company, which is clinging on as the world's fourth most-prolific PC-pusher, last week slipped …
It is definitely possible. There are adapters such as TB to gigabit ethernet and TB to Firewire 800 so a TB to USB3 should technically be possible.
The obstacle is likely not a technological but an economical one. Considering most (or all?) computers with Thunderbolt ports will also feature USB3 ports the market for these devices would be very small. Probably too small for manufacturers to consider.
The only solution would be to get one of those Thunderbolt docking stations which just throw in USB 3 as one of the ports they replicate. Not worth it if you only want if for USB as you'd be paying for heaps of ports you don't use...
It makes perfect sense. Thunderbolt's qualities lie in low-latency, high-bandwidth and low-overhead data transfer. This matters to professionals for whom a tenner for a TB controller is barely noticeable in the 900 hundred quid they spent on their video editing device. It is worth it for them, not worth it for basic consumers for whom USB is good enough.
Considering Acer does not target video editing pros, people who need a 6TB Raid storage or people who need to connect three 4K displays to their machine it was always a weird connector to add to their machines.
I suppose I'm an even less interesting customer for Mac with my old PPC Tiger machines and F/W connections. In my opinion there has never been a better system than Tiger, especially as it lets me use System 9 apps. I also have a Mac Mini on Mountain Lyon - much slower bossy bloatware system nowhere near as good as Tiger. But it does have a Thunderbolt port for what that's worth and that's the main reason I bought it, although I've not used it yet - we'll see...
The major problem is with PC's and BIOS / Windows. You can't hot plug a Thunderbolt device into a PC. You have to reboot for it to work. Intel should have worked out a solution for this. I can hotplug my thunderbolt to gigabit Ethernet adapter into my MacBook Air running OSX and it works as you'd expect. Running Windows with BootCamp and you need to reboot to get it to work on the same hardware. Please fix.
Thunderbolt is PCIe over a cable. Your internal expansion cards are now external. Enclosures exist that let you plug in whatever cards you like, even if you have no expansion inside your actual computer. So your laptop dock just allowed you to have a full spec desktop while docked, complete with powerful (but external, now) graphics card, arbitrary drives, monitors, other expansion ports and so-on.
USB 3 is a completely different technology, a distinct bus/interface, compatible only with itself, with huge piles of driver software layers implementing both the USB 3 and older parts of a standard that was a bit of a creaking mess even back when USB 2 was added. All these years later, there's a good reason vendors are moving to things like SPI to connect internal low bandwidth interfaces rather than dangling them off USB - it's just too slow and software-heavy, even for USB 1. Things got a lot worse when USB replaced PS/2 for those devices, and now, finally, SPI sorts that out.
So what of Thunderbolt? Why is it so rare? The one obvious area where Thunderbolt fails technically is the hugely expensive active cables. Even if they were cheap, active cables are an obvious point for things to fail (and fail badly). But even putting that aside, Intel and Apple decided to push the technology via transfer speeds - a peeing contest. Rather than just say "It's way faster than USB 3" and *then* focus on all the unique and really interesting aspects, they just said "It's way faster than USB 3" and pretty much stopped there. Customers are left in the dark. From their perspective, it's just a funny looking port that has really expensive peripherals. The genuinely remarkable opportunities it offers for new form factors - a much better approach for a hybrid desktop->laptop->tablet kind of affair for example - have been overlooked.
Net result: Very little uptake, no economies of scale, specialist peripheral vendors only, extortionate prices.
The forthcoming updated Mac Pro shows what can be done, but I fear too little, too late and too specialised. I'd love to upgrade my now very old Mac Pro with the new machine, but even if I can afford the base unit, I almost certainly cannot afford the peripherals I'll need for the expansion cards and drives I'd need to carry over.
From the point of view of an end user, USB and Thunderbolt are exactly the same. Both allow you to connect storage devices. Both allow you to connect expansion "cards" like audio or networking. Both support docking stations.
They're both a bus and each one of them requires an extra set of drivers for devices plugged into that bus. You are going to need a NIC driver regardless of whether or not you're plugging it into a slot on your motherboard or a cable plugged into the back of your PC.
One seems to be mostly only available from Apple and the other is pretty much available with any new PC.
Even if you wanted to seek out a PC thunderbolt solution, you would be hard pressed to find one. You would have to buy or build an entirely new machine in order to get it. This is in stark contrast to USB3 where you can just get a cheap card for your current system.
"Available everywhere" versus "looks like an Apple exclusive".
We aren't even at the point where Thunderbolt can compete directly based on price or features.
You do not require new drivers for Thunderbolt. Remember, Thunderbolt is just a transparent PCI-Express bus extension out of the computer case. If you have a driver for the peripheral on PCI-Express, then you already have driver for that same peripheral when moved to an external box and connected via Thunderbolt. Not so with USB or any other bus.
I believe the true reason why Acer are abandoning Thunderbolt is that Acer are 100% dependent of how software behaves on their computers on Microsoft's Windows --- and Windows doesn't support Thunderbolt well. At least, it does not support the most obvious requirement: hot plug.
So what could Acer do? (short of ditching Windows for their computers)
What Apple did was very clever. They convinced Intel to turn LightPeak (great technology, that was sitting in the labs and going no where) into Thunderbolt, by combining it with DisplayPort. Same physical port, compatible signaling etc. So any Mac that has Thunderbolt, has it "transparently". It is not a separate port, it is just there, in the DisplayPort port, if you have any use for it.
One day, you try it and wow... it works and works well. USB usually has problems, performance, reliability, compatibility...
I believe both Apple and Acer are not happy that there are not many Thunderbolt docking stations. For Apple, they have "solved" the issue with the Thunderbolt Display, but why would Acer not build their very own Thunderbolt docking station? Ah yes... Windows doesn't support Thunderbolt hot-plug.. Sad.
> You do not require new drivers for Thunderbolt. Remember, Thunderbolt is just a transparent PCI-Express bus extension out of the computer case
YOU NEED DRIVERS.
It doesn't matter if they are NEW or not.
Support for some random gigabit chipset doesn't just magically pop out of the either. You need a driver that supports it. The interesting thing about USB is that it does define standard device classes and allows you to use a generic driver for that class of device.
This concept is something that is missing from PCIe.
You're just making the assumption that things will magically work themselves out.
> USB usually has problems, performance, reliability, compatibility...
No it doesn't. You're just making up self-serving nonsense.
It's amazing how bad USB suddenly becomes when there's a new flavor of the month for Fanboys to follow. Suddenly that great thing that Apple gave to everyone is not so cool anymore. Suddenly you have to tear it down make the new shiny shiny look better.
Thunderbolt connector is too big and has too many pins to replace USB.
Each connection pin adds:
cost in the materials used,
cost to the PCB it is mounted on,
size and hence cost of the connector shell,
cost and flexibility of the cable, and
point of failure.
Also, I think they have made a mistake, it should have 4 times half-duplex lanes rather than 2 times full-duplex lanes.
It should be marketed as best connection to the processing core for docking station use, but then everyone hates plugging things in, hassle free wireless - inductive chargers (with NFC control), multichannel Wi-Fi.
HDMI has similar problem, but is compared to 15 pin VGA
HDMI Type D is user unfriendly since it looks like micro USB
What if your (smart) TV ran an X-windows server, and you send drawing commands rather than a raster? How would you connect it?
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