Wonder how many monitors this can push. Also, what will happen to Apples 30pin connector on their iPods,iPhones... I guess we will know Tuesday. Are there any external hard drives with thunderbolt yet?
The bandwidth is apparently entirely unimpressive. DisplayPort is currently at 17.28 Gbps, so Thunderbolt can push ... 0.6 monitors? ;) (In the worst case, at least)
I have been excited about Light Peak/Thunderbolt for a year or so now, but in that time it seems the ambitions have become smaller, and the competition has developed as well.
That's not really relevant as long as you can't choose the directions for the channels. You are only going to get one channel in each direction.
Edit: Whoa. I just re-read parts of the Intel documentation, and it seems there are indeed two independent downstream channels. My bad. It also looks like there is no provision for using both channels for a single device? I have no idea.
Check out the Wikipedia page for DisplayPort, as it has a good explanation of the bandwidth requirements for video.
It lists 2560x1600x30bpp @ 60Hz as using just over 8Gbps, so any one consumer monitor will work fine over Thunderbolt.
The 17.28Gbps speed would only be needed for multiple monitors or a high-resolution, high-color-depth, high-refresh or 3D monitor. Thunderbolt and full-speed DisplayPort both have enough aggregate bandwidth for four 1080p streams.
Well possibly, if it's in displayport mode using all four lanes in one direction, it can push that much bandwidth. How much bandwidth does a 27" apple display use?
2560 x 1440 resolution at 24 bits per pixel = 88,473,600 bits
At 60Hz, that's 5,308,416,000 bits per second. So a little more than half the claimed 10Gbit bandwidth of Thunderbolt. I guess you're not going to be running two of them on the same port.
