thunderbolt

Iteration is something Apple is good at. Its 24-inch Cinema Display was good, but it appealed to an extremely small number of users. In 2010, Apple released a new version with an improved screen and by that time there were many more Mini-DisplayPort-compatible Macs in the wild, thus widening its appeal.

With its Thunderbolt Display, Apple adds a superfast connection, as well as Ethernet, FireWire, and Thunderbolt. Note that the display is only compatible with Thunderbolt-compatible Macs, so in effect, we're kind of right where we started with the 24-inch Cinema Display: a powerful monitor that only a small … Read more

If you think the Promise Pegasus is just a bit too big (and you're right!), LaCie has something for you. The company announced today that its first Thunderbolt device, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt external drive, is now available for purchase.

This is the second Thunderbolt storage device on the market, besides the Pegasus, and the first that comes in a design that's small enough for you to carry on the go.

The new drive features a pair of 2.5-inch drives, set up in JBOD, RAID 1, or RAID 0 configurations. Measuring just 1.6 inches by … Read more

Apple's new Thunderbolt Cinema displays just began arriving last Friday, and Apple has been feverishly ensuring they will work properly with existing systems by offering a number of firmware updates for these systems' Thunderbolt connections. Today Apple added to these updates by offering one for the display itself, which according to the updater "improves the stability of the Apple Thunderbolt Display."

Granted, not much information is given about the fixes addressed by this update, but if you own one of the new displays you might as well install the update. The update is a small 923KB download … Read more

Last month, when asked which one was better, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0, I said that it was hard to compare the two since Thunderbolt is about more than just storage. Now here's the proof: Apple's latest Thunderbolt-based device, the Thunderbolt Display.

This is the first display from Apple that uses Thunderbolt as the connection, and from my first impressions, it seems great.

First of all, it's extremely sleek with an aluminum chassis and a gorgeous-looking LED-backlight LCD. It's huge, too, with a 27-inch screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio and a maximum resolution of … Read more

Apple's last major connectivity advancement was in the late '90s with FireWire, which was used as a replacement for the SCSI bus on Mac systems; however, the licensing and complexity of the port made it a less attractive option than alternatives like USB for many device manufacturers, especially given the ease of implementation and eventual speed of USB 2.0. While FireWire has extended beyond its initial 400Mbps speeds to offer 800Mbps, and potentially up to 3,200Mbps, in the face of current alternatives the technology does not seem to be advancing much beyond its current implementations.

Given the … Read more

One of Thunderbolt's features is that it contains both the PCI-express and DisplayPort protocols, which conveniently allows the mixing of both displays and other devices on the same daisy chain. In addition, because Thunderbolt contains DisplayPort, it should also be compatible with existing DisplayPort displays, such as Apple's 27-inch Cinema Display that was available before its Thunderbolt Display was released. Because of this a number of people who have been using Apple's DisplayPort-based Cinema Display have looked forward to using the monitor in a dual-display setup with Apple's new Thunderbolt Display, but unfortunately this will not … Read more

Intel's next-generation processor is expected to add support for a key OS X technology that accelerates gaming and financial applications. That potentially means a more powerful MacBook Air in the future.

Listed as a "core" OS X technology, OpenCL "dramatically accelerates" applications by tapping into the special processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), according to Apple. It taps into what an Apple developer page states as the "the amazing parallel computing power of the GPU."

GPU-centric acceleration can be used for financial modeling, accounting applications, analysis on large media files, games, and media applications. In general, the GPU is much better than the CPU (central processing unit) at certain types of computations--thus the necessity of GPUs in games. … Read more

Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processor will pack two key--some might say essential--technologies that will make it the platform of choice for Ultrabooks. Hint: one of them is not Thunderbolt--the widely publicized connection technology that is now part of the entire Apple MacBook lineup.

For the uninitiated, Ivy Bridge is Intel's next-gen processor that is being manufactured now and is due to land in laptops by the first quarter of next year. It will have more powerful graphics silicon than the current Sandy Bridge chip and offer improved power saving features to boost battery life.

But those marquee features … Read more

Thunderbolt, Intel's high-speed communications protocol, is coming to Windows PCs in 2012.

Acer and Asus should bring out Windows devices--including Ultrabooks--that support the high-speed interconnect technology next year, Mooly Eden, Intel's general manager of PC client devices, told attendees at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco today.

Thunderbolt is a technology developed by Intel under the code name Light Peak that allows for the dual bi-directional transfer of data over copper cable at 10Gbps per channel. Thunderbolt was announced in February and first appeared in Apple's MacBook Pros.

Eden demonstrated a Windows PC connecting to a set of Intel SSDs via Thunderbolt. This allowed it to concurrently stream four uncompressed videos at around 700MBps.

This article originally appeared on ZDNet UK.… Read more