ExtremeTech says Thunderbolt is Dead in the Water!

[swarleystinson]

Sorry, but that's rubbish !!

I had to exchange my Gainward GTX 480 card and get a very expensive - but great - Sapphire Radeon 6970 card to get native minidisplay port.
Only the expensive models come with native (mini) Display port.

I would say less than 1/4 of all graphics card have native display or minidisplay port - so your statement is incorrect by quite a big margin !

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Vh/Regards
Claus - TapaTalk on my Ip4

Will the trolls please go away!? Both his and hellhammer's points are that the NEWER model cards are implementing mDP. That the NEWER cards will continue to embrace it more and more because the manufacturers have finally caught on to the benefits of mDP > other current standards. 6xxx series cards are NEWER. If you looked at all graphics cards made in the past 15 years, a minority would have HDMI!!!

 

[Hellhammer]

Hellhammer - on this subject you're incorrect. AMD is known to support mini) displayport on many of their cards because of their relationship with Apple.

AMD's relations with Apple have nothing to do with DisplayPort. Back when Apple adopted DisplayPort, most Macs were using NVIDIA graphics. In the end, it's the OEM who decides what ports to include, so Apple has nothing to do with this.

Look at the Nvidia cards sold. Only the top models have the displayport. Some OEM' don't support it at all.

And only topmodels from Gainward gas it. Sapphire supports it massively though but in Denmark maybe 1/5 or 1/4 cards sold has the (mini) Display port native.

The cheaper cards sell 3-4 times better than the expensive top cards.

I wasn't talking about NVIDIA. I know most of their cards don't have DP but that is their own loss. Just because NVIDIA has not (yet) adopted it widely does not mean that DP is bad in some way. The support for DP is increasing all the time and including it is easy for OEMs, since it does not include any licensing fees.

 

[swarleystinson]

^^^ what he said.

 

[RoelJuun]

Just interested, what about mini-displayport, is it being widely adopted as well? (I know the technique is the same but the connector differs) Because you just can't connect your ACD to a wide range of video-cards.

 

[roadbloc]

I personally think Thunderbolt will end up being another Firewire because it lacks backward compatibility to other devices unlike USB 3 and people will stick to slower USB rather than buy a shed full of new devices.

I know I won't be using Thunderbolt. I've not nothing to use it with, and when it comes to buying a new device, sticking to USB ensures I stay compatible with everyone.

 

[Hellhammer]

Just interested, what about mini-displayport, is it being widely adopted as well? (I know the technique is the same but the connector differs) Because you just can't connect your ACD to a wide range of video-cards.

It actually is. Most of the newer AMD GPUs (i.e. the 6000-series) have mDP, and that includes the cheapest models too. In fact, I checked this last week and 78% of AMD 6000-series GPUs had mDP or regular DP. Sadly, NVIDIA isn't jumping on the wagon as aggressively but there are a few NVIDIA GPUs as well.

The thing with mDP is that it involves no licensing fees, unlike HDMI. Add great features and solid support for other interfaces into the mix.