Last month – Apple released their new MacBook Pros – they added a mysterious new port known as Thunderbolt.  It’s been developed by Intel, and for a while was known as “Light Peak”.

KeyOptions have just refreshed our training room – with a suite of 16 new Thunderbolt MacBook Pros.  We’ve just started testing them – so I thought I’d put some thoughts together on what Thunderbolt is, what the potential is, and a few initial impressions of the MacBook Pros.

Now, the computer press have already discussed Thunderbolt a lot, but I thought I’d do a few FAQ statements about the technology – particularly how it’s useful, and some common misconceptions:

1. So how fast is Thunderbolt?

Well – it’ll run at up to 10Gb/ sec both to and from the computer, using a Copper cable.  Intel say they think it’ll go faster over Fibre, but that’ll be expensive and will get a bit messy when it comes to running power over the cable.

So that is the ability to copy roughly 1Gigabyte, per second.  So a Full HD movie in under 15 seconds is likely assuming the disks can keep up!

To put this into perspective – FireWire, even at its fastest.. is 800Mbits/sec..or about 0.1 Gigabytes per second.

USB3.0, which is known as “Superspeed”.. is also only half the speed of Thunderbolt.

2. What can I do with the Thunderbolt port?

Right now – you use it as your display port- to attach it a computer display.  This might be an Apple Display that has a “DisplayPort” cable – or an HD TV or other model of display – using DVI, VGA, or HDMI connectors with adapters that Apple sells.

However, longer term – it’s both a Display port, and more importantly it’s an extension to the PCI-Express bus outside the computer.  It’s like giving your laptop a bridge from its internal circuity to a number of attached devices, without losing speed.

2.1 What’s that mean…in the real world?
It means hardware companies could make all sorts of external adapters or connections, that plug into your laptop, that you might traditionally have needed a tower computer like a Mac Pro for.

Some might be….

Fibre Channel adapters.

Faster network ports

Extra FireWire orUSB3.0 ports.

Think audio or video capture devices that have been slowed by FireWire up until now for laptops – or meant you needed to buy the largest, highest-end laptop to attach them to with an ExpressCard.

3.  What devices are available right now for Thunderbolt?

Not much – we have Lacie and Promise have both announced but not shipped storage that uses Thunderbolt- Lacie have a Little Big Disk SSD external hard drive.  Promise have their “Pegasus” Storage which will be terrific for editing a number of streams of HD Video, at once, from a laptop…

Another nice feature of Thunderbolt is “Daisy chaining” – where you to connect a bunch of drives together (like we’re used to with FireWire) – but still stream the data at 10Gb/Sec – so a lot of capacity, and your display, all through a single port..

4.  Can I turn my Promise Pegasus RAID and a few laptops into an Xsan – or a similar “shared storage” setup?

There’s been a bunch of rumours around lately that it’d be a great way to make an Xsan – allowing a number of computers to edit off the same disk.

The theory is – just get a bunch of laptops, one or more Promise Pegasus RAIDs, a network switch and maybe one computer to act as the “Xsan Metadata controller”, install the Xsan software on everything… and you have an Xsan! Right?

Well it would be great -except for one detail that seems to be lost here.

They’re really fast devices – all connected at the same time from the same port… but there’s nothing in there that provides the ability for you to plug those devices into two computers at the same time.  It’s a “Single host – many devices” technology.

Promise call their storage the “Pegasus DAS” or “Direct Attached Storage” so people don’t confuse this kit with the rest of their range that can be easily shared and potentially written to by lots of computers.

So… unless I’m missing something major here – no this isn’t going to happen in that layout.

However – if and when Thunderbolt-based Fibre Channel and Ethernet Adapters arrive – that’s when things could work very well -

When you have a Fibre Channel adapter that connects using Thunderbolt- it would allow a number of MacBook Pros to share an Xsan or a StorNext disk and edit a number of streams, at Full HD etc each.  You’d also need a network port, but Thunderbolt could also do that.

The below is a bit of a simplified example of what the potential is – with laptops editing at “full speed” – ie online edits.

5. Will it replace….Firewire/USB/etc?

Well it’s too early for this.  USB3 is pretty fast, and it has already been around for a while.  FireWire hasn’t been actively updated in speed in a long time, but it’s still going to be cheaper than Thunderbolt cabling.  Apple is already phasing it out on some of their kit.

However what it replaces is kind of not the point – over time Thunderbolt should be the technology that means a lot more can be done on a mobile computer that used to be restricted to desktop computers.

Also – Apple have only really just announced these units  - and Intel have been quoted as saying Apple have close to exclusive use for a period of time – which will make the uptake slower from hardware vendors who also make equipment used by other manufacturers.

6. When will we hear more?

8. Any other tips/feedback about the MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt?

We’ve only unboxed them this week, and I’ll put some more notes into another blog post – but just from our experience:-

- Make sure to download 10.6.7 as soon as you unbox – we have had sleep and display issues with them that have now been resolved. – and these units have a different version of Mac OS X  10.6.7 to other models of Apple computer – so be sure you download the right one.  Software Update from the Apple Menu will work fine.

- These computers still come with a DVD to reinstall the operating system – no USB stick like the MacBook Airs.

- These models only run have drivers for Windows 7 – so make sure if you are thinking of using Apple’s  ”Boot Camp” system and installing Windows  - buy  Microsoft Windows 7.

This won’t affect you so much if you’re running Windows with Parallels or VMWare Fusion – but you may get better

- More to come.

Written by: David Colville on March 31, 2011.
Last revised by: David Colville on April 4, 2011.