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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

So the whole USB2.0/Firewire is going to repeat? Sigh.

Thunderbolt aims to replace nearly every kind of single-use connectors (HDMI, DisplayPort, eSATA, USB, Ethernet). Unifying the connector for displays, peripherals, network and power is a great idea, so I can't complain if they're going up against USB 3.0.

Thunderbolt is a high end connector so it isn't going to displace USB in low end devices.

Ha. Good luck to them. Thunderbolt will be lucky to replace firewire. There's no way in the world it can replace USB, Ethernet or HDMI. Just think of the number of devices out there with these ports.

It might replace SATA eventually, but it will have to fight against USB.

From the Apple page on Thunderbolt: "you can use existing USB and FireWire peripherals — even connect to Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks — using simple adapters."

So, twice as fast as USB 3.0 and compatible with existing devices. Doesn't seem like much of a fight. USB won't disappear overnight, but it's already obsolete.

Thunderbolt may be technically superior in every single way, but unless other manufacturers use it for their laptops/motherboards, Apple's 10ish% market share is going to ensure that USB 3.0 "wins" ultimately. This will wind up being just like firewire where aside from Apple's stuff and a select few "Apple" manufacturers, nobody uses it and consumers either buy the more expensive Apple stuff, or use a dongle and see 0 benefit from the superior tech.

Apple also pioneered USB with the iMac. Because USB was the only way to connect anything to the iMac, it served as a catalyst for device makers to come out with USB devices, since they knew they had a captive market.

Once the number of USB peripherals reached critical mass, the general PC market followed suit.

So, will Thunderbolt adoption more closely resemble that of Firewire, or USB?

I believe the new macs still have USB ports, no? So what incentive do peripherals manufacturers have to use Thunderbolt and target just the new macbooks vs USB 3.0 and targeting everything?

But we're not talking about Apple's marketshare. We're talking about Intel's influence. And that's quite a bit different.

Thunderbolt will replace them. And it will itself be subsequently replaced for its own shortcomings.

It this a qualified statement or are you just guessing?

I’m happily using my FireWire 800 port on my 2007 MacBook Pro. I don’t really have a problem with the competition.

(What’s nice for Apple is that this port isn’t exactly risky for them. If it doesn’t succeed their Macs have a glorified Mini DisplayPort with a lighting bolt symbol next to it. It might cost a bit more for them to add but that’s about it. It seems to me that only Intel has a problem if this fails.)

Seriously. As a non-Mac user, I really can't see going out of my way to use anything other than USB at this point, especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed.

> especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed.

For some uses it's not just a matter of speed - USB2 and FW are similar in terms of speed but USB2 is pretty much unusable for multi-channel audio recording purposes.

And so is FW unless you buy one of the very expensive interfaces that happens to have highly optimized fine tuned drivers.

Source: personal experience finding the drivers of most FW audio interfaces under $1000 impose outrageous CPU loads when doing many channels and using more than one device on the supposedly daisy chainable FW bus.

Funny, my experience is the opposite--FireWire drivers are generally very DMA oriented and require little to no CPU at all, while USB drivers tend to need more CPU for the protocol overhead. This is because FireWire is an address oriented bus and the hardware can map FireWire addresses to CPU addresses and DMA in and out with (literally) zero CPU overhead. A driver write would really have to go out of their way to make a FireWire protocol become CPU bound. I suppose the audio protocol is isochronous based which would be slightly different, but that is still DMA based in every FW implementation I know of.

8 channels of 24 bit/192KHz audio is only 2MB/s which is basically nothing. I'm very surprised that you would see any issues.

I have about 3 or 4 devices in my FW chain (including disks and scanners) and my sub $1000 FW audio interface works just fine.

Same here. I have a $250 FireWire audio interface that imposes basically no load on the system even with upwards of 10 channels in use.

I chose FireWire over USB because of all the complaints I saw in the Amazon reviews for every USB audio interface I looked at; many of the FireWire audio interfaces had absolutely glowing reviews.

I've had similarly excellent experiences with disks connected via FireWire.

Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Even cheap Firewire audio interfaces are light-years better than their USB counterparts.

I still use a USB 2.0 MIDI controller and the latency is absolutely killer. Press a key, a beat later, see the note appear on piano roll...

That's interesting. I've had no problems with USB MIDI adapters. As long as I have less than 5ms latency in my audio path, I'm able to play comfortably over the cheapest USB-MIDI adapter on Amazon. I've also had reasonable success with USB audio interfaces, with latency around 5ms (IIRC - I switched back to my ancient emu10k1 card because of the DSP).

That's USB2, not USB3, and also something that 99% of computer users are not going to run into.

USB2 and FireWire were close to the same speed. Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3 and can push DisplayPorts, so I doubt it will be the same.

Yes, but

1) USB3 has a 1 year lead - check out how many products are out already

2) 5Gbps vs 10Gbps. There are just a couple of SSDs that need SATA III (6Gbps) because the 3Gbps isn't enough. You just don't need the speed for disk I/O. What for then? Current DisplayPorts 1.2 has 17Gbps so I don't really see the Thunderbolt replacing it.

also Firewire 800 was substantially faster in theoretical and particularly in practical throughput

Firewire was 400MBits for 5 years before USB2 was released (USB1 was only 12MBits). Look who won that one.

IIRC, it was because Intel made USB chipsets really cheap vs IEEE1394a (aka FireWire) chipsets.

I recall it being because Apple screwed up the licensing so bad ($1 per port) that everyone got together to create and then push USB 2.0 as a replacement even after the royalties got reduced to something semi-reasonable like 25c per device.

I worked at a place that developed FireWire peripherals. I can tell you the $1/port price never mattered to us, despite the loud backlash on the internet.

The real reason USB "won" is because Intel really pushed it and integrated it into every one of their chipsets. Possibly even licensing it to the other PC chipset makers for cheap/free up front.

Given that Intel is backing Thunderbolt, it stands a good chance at achieving the same widespread usage.

USB can easily be emulated and done using just the CPU, no chips required while Firewire required a real chip that did the negotiation and sat directly on the memory bus for DMA.

I don't care who won, I like my FireWire CF card reader.

Right up until you have nothing to plug it into.

He can plug it into the new Thunderbolt plug with a simple adapter. Thunderbolt is already compatible with USB and Firewire.

It sounds like Thunderbolt is "compatible" with USB and Firewire in the same way ExpressCard and CardBus are -- by putting the host controller that would normally be on a PCI/PCIe card on the bus.

#2 is classic technology short-sightedness. How many times have people said that a 100 GB Hard Drive, 2 GB RAM, etc. is more than sufficient?

I disagree. He's just saying that the speed difference doesn't currently matter, not that it never will. The battle for adoption is fought based on today's usefulness, not tomorrow's (in most cases).

1) true 2) true, but keep in mind that this bandwidth is shared by the entire bus.

Re #2: higher performance external video cards (think 3D accelerator dongles for laptops), cluster interconnects, RAID arrays of SSDs, RAM-based "disks" for use as another layer of cache, lower-latency ultra-high-channel-count external sound cards, etc.

I have maybe 20 products at home that plug into my USB 3 ports.

I don't have anything that plugs into thunderbolt.

I couldn't and wouldn't buy a computer without USB. I can live without Thunderbolt.

Doesn't USB rely on the CPU and FireWire offloads processing to a dedicated chip?

Does anyone know if Thunderbolt is similar to FireWire in this way?

Apple seems to be targetting a whole different sector with this technology. See Cringley's take on this (http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/attack-of-the-minis/) about how this technology could go into data centers. Interesting move by Apple.

Oh, that's just Crazy Bob talking. If that had really been Apple's strategy, they wouldn't have alienated so many customers in the way they killed the xServe line last year. If they had really wanted to keep their toe-hold in that market, they wouldn't have said, "Let them eat mini Macs." I think it's simply the case that Apple's signature advantages in the consumer space don't translate into a 1U world, and they recognized that.

But on the other hand, it does work as a move by Intel...

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