Windows 7 - HP Chooses USB 3.0 Over Thunderbolt

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I think Intel has an uphill battle with this. No devices on the market support their technology and few, if any, in the foreseeable future.

USB has been a go-to interface between devices. It's like Windows on PCs.

Make sense to me, why go to a new port setup when people know USB 2.0 so going with 3.0 and being able to use my old hardware on 3.0 ports like 2.0 ports. The average consumer wont see much of a change between the new standards. Now tell the consumer that they have to buy all new hardware to work with Thunderbolt and we have a issue. Stick with what works HP knows that, when will Intel learn the normal consumer doesnt want to rebuy all their hardware again just for a fancy new port.

Here is Thunderbolt disk that will be available this summer.

LaCie - LaCie Little Big Disk featuring Thunderbolt Technology

Jim

That's the 1st smart thing that HP has done in my opinion in a very long time.

DarkXeno was spot on. Why change a type of interface that people have known to learn, use and enjoy? I think that the total # of devices needing to be plugged in will go down in time, but it's not going to be to far out until people will be plugging in there USB CORD and and not even thinking about it. There will be a small window of time where people are going to be caught without having a 3.0 plug on a computer or device, but that too shall pass.

Firewire anyone??

USB has been the industry standard for to long now. It will take something seriously special/ faster to lure manufacturers away from developing USB3 compliant devices.

Let's stick with the tried and true:

32-bit 25-MHz microprocessor
Monochrome Display Adapter
5¼ floppy disk drive
10 MB hard disk with access time of 0.1 second
64 kB RAM
And for a great price US $3,005 (1981)

Who needs all this new fangled tech stuff


Famous Quotes:

"But what...is it good for?"
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC

640K ought to be enough for anybody.
-Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates


USB3 isn't as fast as SATA 6Gb/s and it will likely be obsolete by the end of the year.
Thunderbolt is 10Gb/s, due to going through copper, light Peak uses all optical fiber and is capable of 100Gb/s.

SSDs will soon be moving more to PCIe for the bandwidth.

Quote:

It will provide a unified interface with enough bandwidth to satisfy virtually everything desktop users need at the same time - DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, USB, FireWire, SATA, you name it.
Daisy chain devices together, and connect everything with one unified connector and port.

Legacy electrical connector devices will work through cables with an electro-optical transceiver on the cable ends so there won’t be any need to use two separate kinds of cables.

Thunderbolt shares the same connectors and cabling with mini DisplayPort, one of the fastest (if not the fastest) desktop interfaces, topping out at 17.28 Gbps.

Thunderbolt is dual-channel, with each channel supporting 10 Gbps of bidirectional bandwidth. That’s a potential 20 Gbps of upstream and 20 Gbps of downstream bandwidth. The connection supports a daisy chain topology, and Thunderbolt also supports power over the cable, 10W to be precise.

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Not to mention cheaper.

Kind of hard to imagine Thunderbolt taking off right now for me. It's entirely possible and looks like a great piece of tech, and I know the new Apple computers are being built on the risk/hope that it takes off in the near future, but lots of "promising" and "great" looking new tech stuff have come and went with barely a whisper before. Some of it appearing at the time, much more promising than Thunderbolt does right now. It seems as solid a hold as USB has now, as cheap as it is, that Thunderbolt has a battle on it's hands to take hold, but I'd love to see it happen!

Hi there
Looks like this is going back to the 80's with a Betamax / VHS type of argument.

If 99% of devices work with USB without major problems and are easily connected to not only most OS'es (including for once even Apple who usually like their own set of standards) but also Virtual machines too -- why on EARTH do we need yet another way of connecting hardware to a PC.

These days how many computers have a PCMCIA card slot any more - I'll bet a few on the forum don't even know what those are even though they aren't that old as devices and as for the smaller express card devices that some later laptops had - well how many people use those either.

In fact even things like internal DVD / CD writers / CD ROM / DVD ROM devices are becoming rarer too -- but the ubiquitous USB device just goes from strength to strength.

I'm not against NEW technology but IMO this is CRAZY to attempt to replace a perfectly working standard - especially as USB 3.0 is probably capable of having a much faster data transfer speed than most of the "Consumer grade" non SSD type of HDD's installed on typical home systems anyway.

No if you want decent devices go IMO for really FAST NET data transfer -- most of the current Network cards have fairly crappy data transfer speeds - especially wireless.

Note also with so called tablet devices eating into the traditional PC market -- the last thing you need is for people to have to go out and buy another whole load of hardware to attach to their PC or tablet.

Stuff will arrive when the market needs it -- how many people at home actually have the need for fibre optic speed technology -- but eventually faster disks etc are always OK.

What the consumer wants on portable machines are SMALLER devices, maybe faster and MUCH LESS power hungry.

We'll have to wait and see -- but new technology doesn't always survive in a harsh market place.
It also needs REAL APPLICATIONS that can show provable benefit by switching to newer technology -- as even in a simple case a decent computer running a 64 bit OS with 4 GB RAM or more will run Photoshop a lot better than the 32 bit system running the same app.


You need to show that the user benefits CONSIDERABLY by switching -- marginal improvements aren't good enough these days -- and if you are usually running things like MS EXCEL - no amount of incredibly fast fibre optic technology will make the slightest bit of difference to your performance in running this type of app.

HDMI now was a justifiable standard since the improvement especially on large screens is very easy for anyone to see. So I'm not against technology improvements at all -- I just need SENSIBLE cost effective ones.

Cheers
jimbo

+1 Well said