Intel promises 10Gb Ethernet with Thunderbolt 2.0 Intel will expand its Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect platform with the addition of Ethernet networking support. The company, presenting at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas, said that the next version of the platform will not only support 20Gbps connections for peripherals, but will …
MacBook Pro does. It has PCI flash rather than SSD and in my tests managed 4153MB or 33224Mb sustained transfer speed over 5 minutes with a large test file to ensure the result wasn't due to cache. Granted you'll be hard pressed to find a Windows laptop which doesn't use cheaper SSD connected to slow SATA but Apple really shine here even if they do use their own connector.
for a bastardised, 2009 vintage, originally optical, interface capable of 10gbps even then in prototype (over 30 metres of plastic optical fibre) with 100gbps promised - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightpeak
Come back with the original and I'll consider it.
If Intel hadn't done a cheaper shonky copper interconnect (promptly taken up as Thunderbolt by Apple, so we know who to blame), I wonder if we would all have a single optical + power interconnect for everything by now (like the Japanese have, but less pricey)?
Losers!
Just as politics is the art of the possible, business is the art of the profitable. Thunderbolt gear is already more expensive than USB 3.0, even with "shonky" copper. Re-using Displayport electronics to drive short length copper cables reduced the cost to vaguely acceptable levels, and also allowed backward compatible re-use of the mini-DisplayPort connector on laptops with very little space for connectors.
There are cases when copper just *wins* from a cost point of view - my workplace has 3500 x86 servers with short passive copper QSFP+ 56Gb/s cables going up to their top-of-rack Infiniband switches. From those switches to the core switches the cables are optical, with active QSFP+ end connectors, and those cables are very expensive. Similarly, racks of servers on 10Gb Ethernet often use passive copper SFP+ cables to get to top of rack switches, with multimode fibre SFP+s back to core switches, if there is no need for full bandwidth from the whole rack back to the core switch.
Anyway, DisplayPort was already quite a cool interface - I've upgraded to a new work Mac and am using my old iMac 27" as secondary monitor; it's a great way to get more life from a nice screen.
Thunderbolt is really awkward for linux right now. From the OS perspective, it's a documented standard - but one which Apple ignores. So many functions have to be implemented twice, including such basics as device connect detection: Once for Apple hardware, once for everyone else.
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