I recently bought a new Macbook Pro. The new Thunderbolt port wasn’t a feature that had me excited. The only reason was I had no idea how fast it was. I was listening to Andy Ihnatko speak on the Macbreak Weekly podcast and in passing he mentioned it was 15 times faster than Firewire 800. It’s so fast it’s similar to having a PCI card or chip directly inserted into the motherboard of your computer. I know we don’t need more power but now I am looking forward to a new UAD, RME and large external SSD all with Thunderbolt.
“Thunderbolt I/O technology gives you two channels on the same connector with 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions.” – apple.com
For more info: apple.com/thunderbolt
This entry was written by , posted on May 18, 2011 at 4:37 am, filed under apple, hardware and tagged apple, audio interface, interface, Thunderbolt. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
UAD says they’re working on products for it. I really hope they come up with something really small like the current Solo cards but for Thunderbolt. Then if Apple would add the interface to the Macbook Air you could configure a REALLY small porta-studio.
I’d be worried about investing too much in this technology. It looks to be another of Apple’s proprietary technologies that comes and goes like FW800.
@Synthetic – it’s actually an Intel thing, derivation of Lightpeak running over copper rather than optical connect. I think the idea of wrapping a couple of PCIe lanes more or less directly in a pluggable interface is a bloody good idea, should make it cheap for people to wrap their existing cards in a portable shell, and 10 gigabits a second should be enough for more or less anything – for now.