IDF: Thunderbolt in 2012 and in Windows machines

IDF: Thunderbolt in 2012 and in Windows machines

The Thunderbolt controllers docks to the south bridge.
Image: Intel
According to Mooly Eden, director of Intel's PC division, 2012 and
Windows systems come with Thunderbolt connector on the market, at least
at least ultra Books from Acer and Asus. In two presentations,
participants were able to incorporate IDF then deeper into the
Thunderbolt details.

Intel Thunderbolt controllers for motherboards have inputs for four PCIe
lanes and DisplayPort (DP). In the latter example, the signal of the
onboard GPU can be fed, while the four PCIe lanes are expected to be
commonly associated with the chipset South Bridge. "At the other end" of
the Thunderbolt cable, or about a Thunderbolt display, an external
storage device or a PCI adapter box, again sits a Thunderbolt
Controller: This has four PCIe x1 ports, a DP output and a Thunderbolt
switch to route the signal through a second thunderbolt jack on another
Thunderbolt device.

Thunderbolt is, ultimately, only one tunnel for PCIe and DP
Image: Intel
From the perspective of the operating system, the Thunderbolt
controllers look like each PCIe bridges, they work with standard
drivers. May be different from the via Thunderbolt, so PCIe controller
chip connected to external devices: You can, for example USB 3.0 xHCI
sit or which blocks for Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, or even graphics
chips. For this load the operating system (hot-plug-compatible) driver.

Ben Hacker by Intel makes it clear that Thunderbolt - how could develop
in the optical light peak precursor fibers also see four - four
10-GBit/s-Kanäle provides, therefore, two for each direction of data
transfer. The transmission takes place at 10.3125 Gbit / s and a net
gross 66/64-Bit-Codierung, ie 10 Gbit / s. The controller removes the
8-bit 10-bit encoding of the injected PCIe 2.0 signals and provides
those of the outgoing signals restored. In other words: Unless absorbs
the DisplayPort signal any data transfer rate that transmits a
Thunderbolt-cable the entire net output of four PCIe 2.0 lanes, which is
2 Gbytes / s per data transfer direction (500 MB / s per lane and
direction). The active electrical cables for the Apple currently
requires about 50 €, can be up to 3 meters long.

Hacker also said that all the interconnected Thunderbolt chips operate
with a synchronous clock signal in order to avoid race conditions. This
timer is to operate on a maximum of 7 "hops" a Thunderbolt-chain
equipment accurate to 8 nanoseconds. Thunderbolt provides further
details of the website thunderbolttechnology.net. Intel expects that
with the further spread of the new interface also increases the supply
of compatible peripherals.