Worried your nice new Mac won’t support those upcoming fiber optical cables? Well, worry no more. Intel has confirmed that the current range of Thunderbolt-capable Macs will indeed support fiber optical cables, which should be ready by next year.
Dave Salvator, an Intel spokesman, told Macworld:
Circuitry will ensure compatibility of optical cables with existing Thunderbolt ports, Salvator said. Copper cables provide adequate data transfer for use over short distances of up to six meters (about 20 feet), but optical cables will be good for data transfers over longer distances of tens of meters, Salvator said.
As for pricing and availability of the fiber optic cables, Salvator said that this is yet to be determined. However, before you know it, the new cables could be stuck in a drawer with your old parallel cables, with an even faster technology on its way.
Intel is already thinking ahead, and researchers at the company are developing technology based on silicon photonics that will be able to move data up to five times faster than current Thunderbolt implementations. The technology is slated to hit the market by 2015.
Are you looking forward to Thunderbolt fiber optic cables?
[via Macworld]
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
6 responses to “Intel Confirms Existing Thunderbolt Macs Will Support Fiber Optical Cables”
Sorry to burst the bubble, but USB maximum bandwidth is 480Mb/s which is 480 megabits. For those who aren’t familiar, there are 8bits to one byte of data, so the speed is actually 480/8=60MB/s which is 60 megabytes per second. The tech industry tends to quote in bits, which makes it seem faster to the average consumer who assumes that Mb is a megabyte. To be fair it can be confusing at times as the difference between MB/s and Mb/s is very slight. That is why the data took a lot longer than 2-3 seconds. Always check whether it’s quoted in bits or bytes as it could make thunderbolt seem insanely fast, as 10GB/s is more than most people could ever use, whereas two ssds in raid can go as fast as 1GB/s (8Gb/s) which is close to maximising one of the bandwidth channels of thunderbolt.
Will it make a “pew pew pew” sound when transferring copious amounts of questionably legal media files?Â
i dont get it.. so you use 1 cable for data, video/audio and internet? really??