Friday, April 29th 2011
Thunderbolt Successor to Boast of 50 Gbps Bandwidth
For the greater part of the last decade, PC device connectivity was limited to the 480 Mbps bandwidth of USB 2.0. The pressing need for more bandwidth to run external hard drives and disk racks was alleviated by eSATA, but eSATA lacked the versatility of USB. After quite some delay, came the next big version of USB, the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, with its massive 5 Gbps bandwidth, plenty for fast and capacious flash drives, and external storage devices.
There was, however, a potential bottleneck lurking with running SSD-based RAID boxes in USB 3.0, as many SATA 6 Gbps SSDs are getting close to the bandwidth limit of USB 3.0. There has also been the need for an interconnect faster than USB 3.0 for high-bandwidth applications such as lossless ultra high definition video streaming in professional environments, and hence came Thunderbolt, which is a copper-electric variant of a fiber-optic interconnect Intel had been working on, codenamed Light Peak. The successor to Thunderbolt is reportedly already under development at Intel Labs.
Thunderbolt delivers 10 Gbps of bandwidth over copper wire, but there's no guaranteeing its market longevity with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth with applications in the future. As early as 2015, Intel will have developed a new device interconnect standard to replace Thunderbolt. The new interconnect will be able to deliver a [currently] mind-boggling bandwidth of 50 Gbps over distances as long as 100 m. The announcement came from Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Thunderbolt is able to make use of its 10 Gbps bandwidth to drive high-bandwidth video encoding applications in environments with external storage, as well as connect high-resolution displays over the DisplayPort protocol. The future 50 Gbps interconnect will build on Thunderbolt's applications by upscaling the bandwidth. There is, however, no definitive word on whether the future interconnect will maintain any kind of compatibility with Thunderbolt. "We see them as complementary. It's the evolution of these connectors and protocols as they move forward," Demain said.
It is likely that Intel will have developed silicon photonics to a greater degree by 2015. At least it should be able to put optical transmitter and receiver into a single chip, small enough to be fitted into smartphones and tablets.
There was, however, a potential bottleneck lurking with running SSD-based RAID boxes in USB 3.0, as many SATA 6 Gbps SSDs are getting close to the bandwidth limit of USB 3.0. There has also been the need for an interconnect faster than USB 3.0 for high-bandwidth applications such as lossless ultra high definition video streaming in professional environments, and hence came Thunderbolt, which is a copper-electric variant of a fiber-optic interconnect Intel had been working on, codenamed Light Peak. The successor to Thunderbolt is reportedly already under development at Intel Labs.
Thunderbolt delivers 10 Gbps of bandwidth over copper wire, but there's no guaranteeing its market longevity with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth with applications in the future. As early as 2015, Intel will have developed a new device interconnect standard to replace Thunderbolt. The new interconnect will be able to deliver a [currently] mind-boggling bandwidth of 50 Gbps over distances as long as 100 m. The announcement came from Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Thunderbolt is able to make use of its 10 Gbps bandwidth to drive high-bandwidth video encoding applications in environments with external storage, as well as connect high-resolution displays over the DisplayPort protocol. The future 50 Gbps interconnect will build on Thunderbolt's applications by upscaling the bandwidth. There is, however, no definitive word on whether the future interconnect will maintain any kind of compatibility with Thunderbolt. "We see them as complementary. It's the evolution of these connectors and protocols as they move forward," Demain said.
It is likely that Intel will have developed silicon photonics to a greater degree by 2015. At least it should be able to put optical transmitter and receiver into a single chip, small enough to be fitted into smartphones and tablets.