A Thunderbolt from the Thunderblue

Thunderbolt made its debut in Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro.

It has been remarked upon many times how Apple deletes a feature, forcing everyone to change. Cue hair-pulling-out and teeth-gnashing.
Goodbye Serial, SCSI, floppy drive. Lots of people get their feathers ruffled - none more so, each time, than not Mac users for some bizarre reason. (My guess is, they just relish any opportunity to rile at Apple.)

This has always turned out to be A Good Thing, once the PC world sheepishly gets in line and pretends it was their idea.

But Thunderbolt is both the same and different to this policy. The technology is actually called Light Peak, but Apple calls it Thunderbolt because, well, the name 'Light Peak' sucks. This is Intel tech after all - Intel is the company that code-names its products as if they're boring suburbs on the North Shore (Penryn, Clarkdale, Lynnfield, Arandale, Sandy Bridge ... zzz).

Thunderbolt is 'the same' because it just arbitrarily appeared on new Macs with no warning (it's on all the latest MacBook Pros). But it's different because, unlike with floppy drives, serial, FireWire 400 and SCSI (and optical drives, which are surely on death row), Thunderbolt is, rather brilliantly, backwards compatible with existing Mini DisplayPort devices.

It's exactly the same to look at as Apple's Mini DisplayPort - and it works the same way as well, which is pretty extraordinary for Apple. Most broad-minded.

That's right - plug an Apple display into the Thunderbolt port and not only does the plug work as normal (as a video port), but all Apple's display adaptors work too, with the third party screen you care to use (other-brand monitors may not look as good or be calibrated out of the box, but they're a hell of a lot cheaper than Apple's).

However, that knocks out your Thunderbolt port for anything else.
Right? Not exactly.

So, what exactly is Thunderbolt?

I'm glad I asked. A thunderbolt is a discharge of lightning accompanied by a loud thunderclap, or its symbolic representation. Bang! But on a new MacBook Pro, it's a port architecture that works as an interconnect. It's essentially a transport, using the PCI Express lane.

In my older MacBook Pro (2007 model), there was a slot in the left-hand side that you could plug a very limited number of devices in, giving faster access to the internal workings. Among the few supported devices was the Sonnet Tango FW/USB Express 34, that added two FireWire 400 port and a USB2 port, giving anything connected direct access to the PCI Express. Another Sonnet accessory added a multi-card reader, and there were a few others.

I also expect a few hub-type arrangements, so you can have a monitor and a hard drive, for example, plus a port or two for the new Canon video cameras just announced.

In the 2010 MacBook Pro I replaced the '07 with, the PCI architecture is still there. It has to be - PCI Express is the technology that links all the high-performance components inside Macs. It's just wasn't accessible to the outside any longer, except in the Mac Pro.

That all changed with Thunderbolt. Intel says it was "developed by Intel ... and brought to market with technical collaboration from Apple."

The new tech gives outside devices access to the PCI Express lane via the Mini DisplayPort connector. You can daisy-chain several devices (up to six) without effecting throughput. Theoretically, while Thunderbolt never offers more than 10Gb/second of bandwidth, it does not slow down when multiple (up to six) devices are connected.

If you need an additional monitor with your MacBook Pro, expect to see devices (maybe new versions of Apple's display connectors, plus from third parties) that allow other Thunderbolt devices to be plugged in at the same time.

The real drama, of course, begins with data. With that throughput of 10 Gigabytes per second - which is very high, BTW - you can transfer a full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds, or back up a year of continuous MP3 playback in just over 10 minutes.

Video and other data professionals must be champing at the bit for new hard drives with Thunderbolt ports - expect these from Promise (they're already available on the Apple Store, but I don't think they have a NZ vendor), and Western Digital and other hard drive vendors, and no doubt Sonnet Technologies is working on a range of peripherals both in the storage arena and on the connectivity front. I also expect some pretty incredible audio interfaces, and who knows what else?

Thunderbolt can supply power-over-cable for bus-powered devices, like FireWire and USB - but it's way faster than those connectors.

USB 2 ('ultra fast'!) runs at under half a Gigabyte per second (480MBs/s), and FireWire 800 at 800Mbps. Express Card slots (as used in Mac Pros for expansion cards) runs at 2.5Gbps. USB3 can handle a pretty impressive 5Gbps. This is just starting to appear in a few PCs, and has potentially been assessed by Apple but disregarded, at least for data.
(I wouldn't rule USB3 out as an input connector some day. Why waste something like Thunderbolt to control a mouse, say, when USB is perfectly adequate and affordable?)

Thunderbolt essentially combines PCI Express with DisplayPort as a new serial data interface that can be carried over longer and less costly cables. PCI Express is widely supported by device vendors (it's not just in Macs) and it's built into most of Intel's modern chipsets, so Thunderbolt can be added to existing products with relative ease. Mini DisplayPort was, if I remember correctly, an Apple refinement of existing technology. So I don't know whether non-Apple devices would licence (or need to) Mini DisplayPort from Apple or not, but presumably another type of connector could be made to carry Thunderbolt.

It's pretty clear that Thunderbolt should become the default option for data throughput on Macs. And this is just the first generation. Expect it to show up in other brands of PCs, too.

I eagerly await some exciting new Thunderbolt-connectable devices.
Apple has posted a page explaining what it all means.

Intel has a page explaining it in more detail.

It's all getting exciting again.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com