Wednesday, 13 June 2012

Thunderbolt Technology with Ivy Bridge Architecture


Thunderbolt is an interface designed by Intel and Apple for connecting peripheral devices to a computer via an expansion bus.Thunderbolt is the new generation in the I/O Technologies. It is codenamed as  Light Peak. It is combination of  PCI Express and Display Port.





Its a Serial Data Interface. Thunderbolt is with high-speed transfer rate and dual protocol I/O interface that  provides unmatched performance over current I/O technologies with 10Gbps bi-directional transfer speeds. So it supports upto  It provides flexibility and simplicity in the information transfer system. It supports DATA through PCIe and VIDEO through Display Port. It can carry all the information through a single Thunderbolt Cable daisy-chain up to six devices including up to two high-resolution Display Port(v1.1a) displays.

Figure PCI Express and DisplayPort transported between Thunderbolt controllers over a Thunderbolt cable.

It multiplex the incoming  information from PCI Express and Display Port at the transmitter end and carry that multiplexed information through the Thunderbolt Cable to a destination Thunderbolt Controller. This destination Thunderbolt Controller de-multiplex  the information and distribute to their certain path. Actually Thunderbolt is a flexible and innovative system design ideal for thin profile systems and devices like Ultrabooks, MacBook Air etc.

Thunderbolt port is like any other ports(USB Port, LAN Port etc). Each Thunderbolt port supports 40 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth including two pairs, each pair have 10Gbps Transmit and 10Gbps Receive Lane. 



Thunderbolt is starting with the launch of Ivy Bridge. Now Thunderbolt is coming to PCs. So, we'll see it on notebooks as well as some desktop motherboards soon. First desktop motherboard with next-gen Thunderbolt support: MSI's Z77A-GD80.



Note: Images in this post come from Apple , Intel , MSI and Wikipedia

No comments:

Post a Comment

Tech N Science © 2013