New Macbook Pro "Thunderbolt" - Savior for pro-video on laptops?

Z

zijital

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I got a 15" MBP in 2007, and the biggest things I like about it vs the last generation of MBP is that it has an Express card slot, a FW800 & a FW400 port. When Apple took away the Expresscard slot & the FW400 from the 15" MBP, I as well as many other people, were upset.

No more P2 card reader, SxS card reader, Maxtrox expansion, etc etc etc

Will the new thunderbolt change all that? Will vendors line up & start supporting? ...
http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/
 
I have been waiting on something like this for awhile. Seems like the laptops alone are a great upgrade, the Ram upgrade does not seem too steep for a change. And I am really excited about Thunderbolt. I can not seem to find any devices yet, but at 4 times faster than my espress card slot, I am a happy camper. It seems like the adapters will be simple, and daisy chaining them is fantastic. Lots of sunshine and lollipops. My laptop is on the market, and I will be ordering the new 17 inch.
 
Just ordered the 13" model. Looking forward to get a Thunderbolt HDD with it, hope they launch quickly!
 
I like the idea, without question, but performance enhancement for things like reading CF or P2 cards I just don't see happening. For instance, FW800 is OVERKILL for many of the hard drives I hook up. Sure, a stripped raid could benefit, but for my simple backup drives, FW400 is sufficient in throughput. What really needs some innovation is hard drives. Even solid state are fairly slow for writing for most of them. I find my drives are the single biggest bottleneck of my computers.
 
10-20gb file transfer in 30 seconds, plays 4 uncompressed HD streams at once. Quad core chips on a laptop. Very cool stuff, except the first thunderpolt/lightpeak product won't launch until "Spring" and all the hard drive companies have started to sell USB3.0 hard drives...yes I know Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3.0 but which one are manufacturers backing right now?

That being said, the switch of video from Nvidia to AMD is interesting as are the quad core CPUs.

Edit, from the press release:
"Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital are all among the roster of firms committed to pushing out Thunderbolt-equipped devices, which will include displays, storage devices, audio/video devices, cameras, docking stations and more."
 
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Maybe FCP 7 was so half assed because the launch of the "real" Final Cut upgrade (FCP 8) partly awaited this technology to be fully developed so Apple would have a computer worthy of taking full advantage of its capabilities. I knew Apple wouldn't abandon us filmmakers and editors!
 
DChang said:
10-20gb file transfer in 30 seconds, plays 4 uncompressed HD streams at once. Quad core chips on a laptop. Very cool stuff, except the first thunderpolt/lightpeak product won't launch until "Spring" and all the hard drive companies have started to sell USB3.0 hard drives...yes I know Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3.0 but which one are manufacturers backing right now?

That being said, the switch of video from Nvidia to AMD is interesting as are the quad core CPUs.

Would have been nice to hear some support from AJA, G-tech, etc. Let's hope there are more HDs out in a year supporting this than there are FW800 today.
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the great thing about it is you can make an adapter for it.
thunderbolt to usb3 or esata or firewire or anything you want.
intel has been pushing these to replace all cables inside computers because it can be adapted to any kind of ports
 
Oetam said:
SSDs are a lot faster than HDDs.
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Thanks. It seems going with an SSD option, while expensive, would be the best solution.

What about buying a MBPro with a 5400 HDD then buying (and installing) a third-party SSD later? Is that possible?
 
Keep in mind that if you're hooked up to a monitor through this, you'll be losing some of the bandwith.

"Thunderbolt also provides 10 watts of power to peripherals, so you can tackle workstation-class projects on the go."

I wonder if we'll get a follow up to the Panasonic AJ-PCD2 P2 USB card reader w/o external power like Sony's SxS USB reader (SBACUS10). Or if Sony will come out with a SxS reader that doesn't need AC power. Or how many HDDs we can power on 10W.
 
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Oetam said:
SSDs are a lot faster than HDDs.
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Not all of them. I did a lot of reading on some of the different brands and found some REALLY slow ones for writing. You have to really look at the stats and find someone else who has benchmarked the drive you are looking at. The Intel drives are BLAZINGLY fast, although VERY pricey. This is why I want to use an SSD as my boot drive. The really small ones are REALLY FAST!
 
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Rick, I think you may be mixing up mb/s (mega-bits) and MB/s (mega-bytes). FW400 is rated at 400mb/s or 50MB/s.

Thunderbolt looks to be 10gb/s (giga-bits) or 1.25GB/s (giga-bytes) if I am interpreting it correctly.

This would make it 5 times faster then an Intel SSD, not 40 (which you get by multiplying 5 x every 8 bits that make up a byte).
 
William_Robinette said:
Rick, I think you may be mixing up mb/s (mega-bits) and MB/s (mega-bytes). FW400 is rated at 400mb/s or 50MB/s.

Thunderbolt looks to be 10gb/s (giga-bits) or 1.25GB/s (giga-bytes) if I am interpreting it correctly.
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That does look like the case :) Why can't they just pick one and use it! :)
 
William_Robinette said:
Because that would be sensible!
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So true. It's like chip speeds. The M(G)Hz does not matter, what matters is the DMIPS of a processor. (I am a chip designer) When we talk about CPU speed from a calculation standpoint, this is what we care about. When we talk about it from a manufacturing, power and timing closure standpoint, we do talk clock speeds, but I've never understood why the industry just doesn't talk sense in advertising. That's like asking someone, hey, how many miles to gallon does this car get? And they respond, it has a 14 gallon tank! :)
 
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