Apr 07
Already released with OS X Mavericks for Apple computers, Thunderbolt Networking will be coming soon to the PC environment. Intel has made clear this week that they’re bringing full demonstrations … Continue reading
Apr 03
There’s a new Elgato device being released this month with the ways and means to connect several of your devices in an above-average easy way. This is the Elgato Thunderbolt … Continue reading
Oct 25
The release of the 33-foot-long Thunderbolt Optical Cable by Corning is a long-awaited event. For those that want to move data along a wired connection – a long distance, at that – there’s a lot to be said about the 10 Gbit/s bi-directional, dual channel technology, and as the first “all-optical” offering in the world […]
Jul 30
It’s a frankenstein monster of efforts, this computing rig appearing this afternoon, one that connects a MacBook Air to graphics it has no business running on its own – but certainly has the ability to roll with, it would seem. This amalgamation of bits and pieces starts with a Thunderbolt to Express Card adapter, moving on then to an ExpressCard to PCI-Express adapter, then connecting in the end to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 graphics card. This beast then – after all that – brings what very much appears to be a high-end gaming experience to the Apple notebook.
The only caveat – other than an exposed set of fans, if you don’t wrap it all up – is the fact that you’ve got to use Apple’s Boot Camp to run Windows to make this all happen. Inside Boot Camp, Windows can bring the driver requirements needed to work with this high-powered graphics card, and the adapters seem to do the rest!
This setup is able to be plugged and unplugged with ease, making the MacBook Air an at-home beast of graphics delivery when you’re sitting down, a mobile computer as it’s marketed as when you’re not in the mood for gaming.
“You’ll get faster performance with an external monitor, but you’ll lose the convenience of not needing a giant monitor. This becomes relevant as people make better eGPU cases where your eGPU will be portable. Why bring a monitor to your friend’s place when your laptop already has one?” – Larry Gadea
Larry Gadea is the creator of this rig, and his original post to the Tech Inferno forums has more details on benchmarks and build options than you’ll ever care to sift through. Instead you’ll probably just want to kick this rig out yourself.
Meanwhile we’re reveling in the fact that someone saw things similar to Chris Davie’s column from earlier this year: Dear Apple, here’s what I want from the new Thunderbolt Display, complete with display-based GPU. Keep it powerful, and Apple – keep considering it!
VIA: MacRumors
MacBook Air rigged with NVIDIA GeForce GPU for Thunderbolt super-build is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
May 01
After over a year of waiting, Belkin has finally released its Thunderbolt Express Dock. It was originally announced last year in January and was slated for a September 2012 release, but that obviously never happened. However, Belkin just launched the $299 dock yesterday, and we’ve taken the time to give it a good look-over and test it out for ourselves. Personally, as a MacBook Pro user who is constantly docking and undocking my laptop at my desk, I wanted to see if Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock would make the whole process easier. Let’s find out how it fared.
Design-wise, the Express Dock is made to blend in perfectly with Apple’s line of Mac machines. It rocks an aluminum unibody shell with black plastic panels on the sides and back, and just like a good mullet, there’s not a lot going on in the front, but there’s a party in the back — all the ports are situated on the rear of the dock. You’ll find an ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, three USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt ports (which support daisy-chaining), and separate 3.5mm audio-out and audio-in jacks.
One of the two Thunderbolt ports is used to plug the dock into your Mac, but that’s all it takes to get access to all the other ports. Instead of having to plug all of your peripherals in one after another every time you dock your MacBook at your desk, all you have to do is plug everything into the Express Dock when setting it up, and then just simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port. At that point, you’ll be all set to go. This fact alone I found really convenient as I didn’t have all these cables that I had to keep plugging and unplugging every time I wanted to undock my MacBook. It’s just one single cable and you’re good to go.
While the Express Dock will work for desktop Macs like the iMac and Mac Pro, it’s essentially meant for those with MacBooks, which don’t have a lot of options when it comes to ports, especially MacBook Air users. If you use a MacBook as your main machine and want more port options, the Express Dock is about the only convenient option out there. Simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port and you’ll instantly have eight more ports at your perusal, which is pretty fantastic.
However, there are some caveats. The Express Dock doesn’t come with a Thunderbolt cable in the box, so you’ll want to make sure that you have one on hand in order to connect it to your Mac. Secondly, the Express Dock requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to take advantage of all its capabilities. The dock will at least work on older versions of OS X, and I was able to hook up a Thunderbolt display to the dock, but it wouldn’t recognize any of the USB 3.0 drives that I had on hand, nor would the audio ports work. However, once I connected it to a Mountain Lion machine, everything worked flawlessly.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the USB 3.0 ports on the Express Dock are limited to 2.5Gbps, which is almost half the speed of what it’s supposed to be at (4.8Gbps). We’re not exactly sure why this is, but it’s still much faster than USB 2.0, which Macs are still sadly stuck at (unless you have one of the newest models). I also noticed that the dock would get hot after a short while, including both ends of the Thunderbolt cable. Nothing exploded, thankfully, but it was always a bit of a concern after I had it plugged in for an hour or so and had tons of things plugged into it. It never got hot enough that I couldn’t touch it, but I was certainly surprised that it gets a bit warm.
Portability is another thing to consider, especially since the dock is catered towards MacBooks. The Express Dock is lightweight and can easily fit into a backpack to take with you. However, the power adapter that’s required to power the Express Dock makes the device not too portable-friendly. It’s about the same size as a typical laptop power adapter, which isn’t a bad thing, since they’re also made to be portable along with the laptop its charging, but if you were to take both your MacBook and the Express Dock with you on the road, you now have two bulky power adapters to deal with. The dock can certainly be portable, but it’s really up to the user whether or not lugging it along will be worth it.
In the end, Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock is the perfect companion to a MacBook power user. However, you’ll have to think long and hard about whether or not you truly need it, since it costs a whopping $300, so it isn’t just something that you can buy impulsively. There is a cheaper option available for $250, but that’s still a hard pill to swallow. Then again, if you’re like me and constantly find yourself docking and undocking your MacBook, dealing with a tangle of numerous wires at the same time, the Express Dock could be one of the best convenience products that you ever buy. Plus, if you’re rocking a MacBook Air and wish you had more ports at your disposal, the Express Dock is a good choice for that too.
Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock Review is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apr 08
At NAB 2013, Intel just announced the next-generation of Thunderbolt, codenamed “Falcon Ridge,” which is Apple’s latest protocol for file transfer, as well as transmitting video. Intel says that the next-generation Thunderbolt protocol will be able to push 20Gbps and will support 4K video when it’s planned to launch in 2014.
Intel says Falcon Ridge will include backwards compatibility with current-generation Thunderbolt devices, although anything using the current standard will be kept at those same speeds of 10Gbps. This means that Falcon Ridge is twice as fast as the current-generation of Thunderbolt, which is quite impressive and something that haven’t seen yet.
Intel demonstrated the new technology using top-of-the-line components that are available today and were able to achieve speeds of 1.2Gbps, which is a far cry from what the Falcon Ridge is capable of, but the most obvious bottleneck is the stage at which hardware components are at right now. If you were to use current-generation Thunderbolt, you’d have to get a solid state drive just to take advantage of the faster speeds.
Thunderbolt is over two years old now, and it’s becoming a mainstream feature in Apple’s products, but taking advantage of the file transfer protocol is costly, with Thunderbolt external hard drives costing much more than USB 3.0 or eSATA drives. It’s certainly an investment if you’re looking for faster transfer speeds, but it’s really worth it in the end.
[via Engadget]
Intel announces next-gen Thunderbolt: 20Gbps throughput and 4K support is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 02
This week the folks at Sumitomo Electric Industries have announced that they’re the first group in the world to receive certification from Intel to produce optical Thunderbolt cables – time to get long! This means that once they get moving with production, SEI will be able to produce cords up to 100 feet in length rather than the approximately 10 foot length they’re limited to today. While today’s Thunderbolt cable requires metal components that limit their length to about the size of a desk, we’ll soon be rolling out across the whole room with optical builds.
The announcement from Sumitomo Electric Industries notes that they’ll be able to keep the full 10 Gbps speeds that the metal cables have shown. They also mention that even if the cables they’re producing are “tangled or pinched” up to 180 degrees, they’ll retain their signal fully. These cables have been assured to be as thin as the current standard metal-carrying Thunderbolt cables while their heads will be ever-so-slightly modified.
Each new Sumitomo Electric Industries optical Thunderbolt cable will have a 38mm connection head rather than the original metal cable’s 28mm. This and the fact that these new optical cables will not be able to power devices such as hard drives may be a hinderance for many hoping to continue their Thunderbolt access across their home, but for those already using separate power supplies, the game is on.
The Sumitomo Electric Industries team has made it clear that all Apple computers and devices shipped with standard Thunderbolt cable compatibility on the market thus far will be working with their new cords. They’ve not yet announced pricing or availability, but you can bet you’ll be seeing these cords before 2013 is ended (especially since they started shipping sample products back in April of 2012.)
[via Sumitomo Electric]
Thunderbolt cables go fiber optic (up to 100 feet long!) is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jul 24
Apple has started shipping a different Thunderbolt Display SKU to its stores and Official Resellers. The new SKU is largely the same as the old one, which suggests that the differences between the two products aren’t going to be very substantial. 9to5Mac discovered the change, pointing out that the Thunderbolt’s SKU has been changed from MC914LL/A to MC914LL/B and noting that this switch is only a couple of days old.
So, what does the change signify? Apparently, the change is due to the fact that Apple is now shipping MagSafe to MagSafe 2 converters with the Thunderbolt Display in the box. Indeed, all signs point to that as the change, with Apple’s store listing for the Thunderbolt Display updated to show that MagSafe to MagSafe 2 converters are now included in the purchase price. That isn’t exactly a big surprise, considering that Apple has already been providing the converter free-of-charge to those who purchase the Thunderbolt Display in its stores, and has been doing so since June 11 – now the company is just providing one in the box rather than on the side.
Since Apple hasn’t outright confirmed the meaning behind the change, there’s still a chance that the SKU switch could mean something different (or something more). Still, the evidence strongly suggests that the converter is the reason behind the change, and even if it isn’t, the similarities in the SKUs signify that the change is nothing major.
Apple now shipping different Thunderbolt Display SKU is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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