Ableton Forum

Agreed Thunderbolt isn’t a USB 3 killer. UBS 3 is a USB 3 killer due to the huge gap between lip service and implementation.

So to keep things even lets just start talking about Thunderbolt 2 right now.

I'm enjoying my PLETHORA of USB3 devices even as I type this.

I love how USB3 has been bandied about since the earth was still warm, but Thunderbolt was conceived and implemented in less than 2 years.

Pretty much because Apple put their weight behind it.

Oh USB3.....we hardly knew ye.

Let's not forget that it took a bazillion years for USB 2.0 audio interfaces to appear on the market... did you expect USB 3 gear to appear faster?

The new MacBook Pros would be a lot cooler if they had USB 3.0 as opposed to 2.0. I suppose you disagree with this as well.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

I was starting to feel sorry for Microsoft due to the severe lack of newsworthy offerings they’ve come up with lately and even Google has surpassed them in inconsistent OS user experience world dominance.

But then my work decided to upgrade our computers with the latest version of office, and HOLY SHIT WHAT A HORRID POS. It looks like it was designed for people either under the age of 5 or over the age of 65. Even the most basic functions need menu diving now and the task bars are a clusterfuck of functions you never use and makes yahoo’s home page look as simplistic as google by comparison. I’ve seen aerial shots of landfills that look more elegant and organized than this monstrosity.

NOW BACK TO TALKING ABOUT THINGS THAT MATTER

One simple reason USB 3 will still be a valid protocol for a couple years, It's backwards compatible with USB 2 and 1.
Thunderbolt will require converters, which will be painfully expensive no doubt. I'm all for Thunderbolt and USB 3 being the standard on macbooks next year, and by then I might be able to freaking afford one.

beats me wrote:COMMERCIAL BREAK

I was starting to feel sorry for Microsoft due to the severe lack of newsworthy offerings they’ve come up with lately and even Google has surpassed them in inconsistent OS user experience world dominance.

But then my work decided to upgrade our computers with the latest version of office, and HOLY SHIT WHAT A HORRID POS. It looks like it was designed for people either under the age of 5 or over the age of 65. Even the most basic functions need menu diving now and the task bars are a clusterfuck of functions you never use and makes yahoo’s home page look as simplistic as google by comparison. I’ve seen aerial shots of landfills that look more elegant and organized than this monstrosity.

NOW BACK TO TALKING ABOUT THINGS THAT MATTER

Yes - not nice - cant find a damn thing in the last couple of versions.

All this discussion on the slow industry adoption of thunderbolt has solidified my decision to get an Air asap. Briefly I was thinking I should maybe hold out until they do a refresh that has a thunderbolt port, but really I think it’s going to be at least a year before we see a decent move in utilizing the I/O and even at that point it won’t be as mind blowingly wide spread and futuristic as they are promoting it right now.

Game changing? Eventually, but not soon and not to the point where your computer will be a paperweight without it.

You will absolutely see support of Thunderbolt in a MUCH faster timeframe than you did USB2.

I would expect to see HDs from Lacie, WD very soon - Lacie have allready annouced a 500GB thunderbolt SSD - dunno when it will be avialable though - and very expensive I guess.
Promise are on board as well - presumably for when the mac pro gets updated as I cant imgaine them doing a huge thunderbolt raid box for an MBP
Likely Apogee/Avid will probably be jumping on for a sucessor to their existing Symphony 64 interface. If they do that, then I might expect RME to refresh their MADI interfaces some time after, but RME havnt made any noise about such a thing.
Aja will probably update their Kona video suite interfaces, Blackmagic theirs too I guess.

Not heard of anyone doing anything yet with USB/FW hubs etc.

What most telling in most of the above is apart from WD, the rest are all involved in either high end (ie expensive) gear, or annouced a high end and likely expensive device (LaCie), so Im guessing that implementing a thunderbold design isnt exactly cheap. As for WD - dunno - Perhaps more likely to see them update their my book studio 2 to include thunderbolt later in the year.

However - nothing from any of the usual suspects in the USB/FW interfaces market - perhaps its still too expensive, however for an 2011 MBP needing USB3 in the future - its the only option - so might eventually see something from belkin if USB3 device availability continues to grow and thunderbolt get cheap enough to implement for them.

I dont know anything about the quality and performance of lacie stuff in general, so no idea if such an SSD from them would actually be that good?

Another good point: Price. If current SSD drives are a good yard stick by which to measure than thunderbolt technology isn't going to be cheap....and mostly based on it just being new and because they can. A-holes.

Another reason rapid adoption will take place is the sheer scale of speed increase we're seeing with Thunderbolt.

It's utterly and totally crushed any previous ratio increase when moving from one standard level to the next.

As ethnocentric as we are, it's the video post production world that will see immediate benefits - and they'll pay to get them because the performance increase is so fucking off the charts. It's funny to read that thread in general where Thunderbolt benefit comments in music production run along the lines of "finally I'll be able to really get my 128 track set going!" The amount of data/plug requirements from the most complicated set is a pittance compared to a feature length film in HD that's seeing massive amounts of postFX work in Final Cut Pro or After Effects or .....

LoopStationZebra wrote:It's utterly and totally crushed any previous ratio increase when moving from one standard level to the next.

And the usual counter to that is its only just over double what USB3 is (10Gbps vs 4.8Gbps).

What they perhaps forget - USB tends to have a significant protocol overhead - 10%-15% being common for variable size data transfers, and current computers and devices with a very heavy driver architecture allready struggle a bit with maxing out USB2 due to the very heavy demands on the host to manage the protocol.

Thunderbolt (AFAIK) is litle more than signal buffering and serialization on top on the existing PCI-express lanes and so gains from the DMA support they have for bulk data I/O as well as light software dependenncy (unlike USB3 which is quite heavy on host software), so in reality, I could see thunderbolt managing a real world differential of 5x - maybe even 10x or more and certainly should be able to manage quite high utilization - 70% or more (7Gbps real world performance) while USB3 might be severely struggling to keep up with a SATA 2 drive.

Khazul wrote: What most telling in most of the above is apart from WD, the rest are all involved in either high end (ie expensive) gear, or annouced a high end and likely expensive device (LaCie), so Im guessing that implementing a thunderbold design isnt exactly cheap.

I don't think these companies announced support for Thunderbolt so quickly because they greedily want to make expensive gear for rich people. They announced support quickly because they already make PCI Express products, and porting them over to Thunderbolt is going to be fast and easy for them.