Will Thunderbolt upgrades ever exist for a 2012 Mac Pro?

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deconstruct60

Consistently great info and common sense.
Thanks for playing chess and not checkers.

 

[Tesselator]

The narrow thinking is that Thunderbolt alone solves these problems. The only "breadth" in thinking here is sweeping in MBA and Mac Mini solutions into the same solution space as the Mac Pro. For a discussion about what should go into Mac Pros that is a bit dubious if focused on maximizing the Mac Pro's potential.

Strawman: The thread is about Thunderbolt not "maximizing the Mac Pro's potential".

Anyone with a x4-x8 PCI-e SAS RAID card could achieve the ~1000MBps over 2014's 20Gb/s TB data transfer numbers in the recent Thunderbolt demo ( can't buy for a year or so ; just a demo) for the last 2-3 years. For example:

"...With its PCIe 2.0 interface, the MAXPower 4-Port eSATA RAID Card provides two 500MB/s data lanes for a total card bandwidth of 1000MB/ ..."
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MXPCIE6GRS4E/

or
" .... Without this, we simply couldn’t pull up numbers any where near 3GB/s write as seen here. ...."
http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews...ntroller-review-ssd-in-raid-0-as-ssd-hd-tach/

Strawman: We're obviously talking about external RAID arrays. Duh! And the only way to do that now with the speeds being discussed is by running a buttload of wires externally or using expensive PCIe extenders. And you would have to build your own case at any rate because no enclosures that I know of have 4 or 8 eSATA for each individual drive - as would be needed.

At some point Thunderbolt might compete against these solutions on price, but so far it has not to any clear and consistent advantage.

Strawman: That you can see. Others seem to be able to see more clearly.

Anyone who wanted it and had the money could already have it, instead pining away for Thunderbolt that isn't deployed yet. Thunderbolt in and of itself doesn't make for fast SSD RAID 0 arrays. There are multiple ways of achieving that. There is a difference between thinking broadly to find a focused solution to a problem and thinking broadly to grasp at justifications for Thunderbolt.

No time at all because not really restricted now for Mac Pro users.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossd.html

Although a internal only solution it is easily mutable into a external one.

Strawman: Just because there is another way doesn't negate this way. And the TB way is more convenient and cost effective by an order of magnitude. Like I said... very narrow thinking!

This is one of those "sales pitch spins" from back in the LightPeak era. Now that TB is out, there little solid evidence to back that up.

" ... The spec for max trace length between the Thunderbolt controller and port is two inches, compared to up to 10 inches for Intel's USB 3.0 controller. ... "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5884/...s-part-2-intels-dz77rek75-asus-p8z77v-premium

PCI-e and others have longer trace length restrictions than "raw" TB signals do. Sure, once you get to an amplifying transceiver the distances get bigger, but costs and internal space usage have jumped.

Back when Lightpeak had the possibility of building the transceiver amps into the controller that sales pitch made more sense. With the current design mandates of having active amp/transceivers in both side of the cable, it really doesn't make much sense in the PC space for internal deployment.

That kind of set-up requirements may make sense in a "large as a rack" computer, but not in the PC space. There are no 1-3 m distances to cover inside PCs in general. In fact, the general trend for PCs is to get smaller; not larger. So Thunderbolt doesn't really bring anything significant to the party distance wise. Fiber TB might cut down on internal RF problems. However, the fiber solutions for TB aren't all that much cheaper (relative to PC pricing norms) than other solutions already leveraged in larger computers already (bigger IBM boxes). [ Fiber being another one of these "Lightpeak" spins that hasn't show up in the marketplace. ]

The above is all irrelevant gibberish. You're obviously trying to strengthen your opinion but no one cares. TB exists, it will be showing up in products more and more, it is more convenient and faster than what we have now, and all the jibber-jabber you want to throw at it won't change that. The only question which remains and the subject of this thread itself is: When if ever, will we see one for existing MacPro models?

It is your wobbly weak proposals that are strawman.

Strawman: I proposed nothing.


But I'll stop now because I think you are purposefully trolling for exactly this kind of response - as you seem to do in almost every thread you're involved in. I'm already eating a triple-decker troll sandwich in answering this.