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Sony Vaio Z gets the in-house teardown treatment (video)

Sharif Sakr — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:24:00 -0400

Another official teardown, another predictable revelation: the new Sony Vaio Z's viscera are thinner, flatter and, er, more compressed than those of its predecessor. But at least this dissection is performed by an actual Vaio engineer who ought to know his stuff. In the video after the break, Shinji Oguchi explains how cooling was improved using a range of tricks, like aerating the laptop's guts via holes in the keyboard. He also splits open the innovative external media dock, which connects via Intel's Light Peak technology and uses a discrete GPU to give the Vaio Z some gaming oomph. Finally, there's a separate, speeded-up video of Shinji putting the whole thing back together again from memory. The poor guy must be sick of it by now.

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External Thunderbolt graphics card for Macs to be developed soon, thanks to Facebook poll

Billy Steele — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 11:39:00 -0400

Have you ever let your Facebook friends determine a new product development decision for your company? Well, Village Instruments has, via an online poll in order to gauge interest in an external Thunderbolt PCI Express graphics card enclosure. Dubbed the ViDock Thunderbolt, this device will soon begin to dramatically improve the performance of today's Apple machines. Running at speeds of up to 10Gb/second, the new T-Bolt model can move data much faster than the company's current Express Card-connected external GPU. So if you're rocking the new MBP model, but you've got a hankering for more power out of your graphics card, you better start saving your Benjamins.

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Apple leaks Cinema Display refresh, teases dual-monitor Thunderbolt setup?

Joe Pollicino — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 09:04:00 -0400

The ~~cat~~ Apple is out of the bag, apparently. Thanks to a leak on its website, there's evidence that Cupertino's readying a formal introduction of Thunderbolt to more devices. Keen eyes from MacRumors have spotted products on the site now sporting OS X Lion backgrounds, notably, what appears to be T-bolt connected Cinema Displays. The images showing the hook-up no longer appear to be listed, but the dual-setup above sure looks nifty. Considering Lion's got about two weeks left to rear its head and meet that July release, we'd surmise it won't be long until you'll be able to opt for a similar rig. Now can we please just get an anti-glare option?

[Thanks, Trey]

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Apple Thunderbolt cable, Promise RAIDs now available to get your 10Gbps interconnect on

Joe Pollicino — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:56:00 -0400

Was it really four months ago that Intel and Apple took the curtains off of Thunderbolt I/O? The MacBook Pro and iMac lines have since been refreshed with the interconnect, but early adopters haven't had much more than a fancy port to stare at. Thankfully, Apple's $49 T-bolt cable is finally available as your ticket to the 10Gbps superhighway. Apparently, it quietly hit Apple's web store this morning along with some fresh Promise Pegasus RAID enclosures ($1k for 4TB up to $2K for 12TB) to support it. All of the peripherals appear to be in stock and ready to ship; so if you've been eagerly waiting to make use of that extra port, now's your chance.

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Intel Thunderbolt dev kits coming this quarter, hopefully ushering in more 10Gbps-capable devices

Vlad Savov — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:39:00 -0400

Intel has just announced it will soon be making development kits available for its new Thunderbolt interconnect. The cable that can carry 10Gbps (in both directions!) has so far only seen itself installed in Apple's MacBook Pro computers, but storage and other peripheral manufacturers are starting to unveil their lightning-scorched offerings this week at NAB and this announcement is sure to give Thunderbolt an extra spur of momentum. What's going to be intriguing going forward is to see whether manufacturers take it up instead of USB 3.0 or install the DisplayPort lookalike alongside the latest and greatest from the USB camp. If you ask us, we can never have enough high-speed interconnects... how does SuperSpeed Thunderbolt sound?

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Apple and Intel unveil Thunderbolt I/O technology

Tim Stevens — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:01:00 -0500

So it's perhaps not the most original moniker that Apple and Intel could have chosen, but it's here just the same. After years of waiting Apple has launched its implementation of Intel's Light Peak standard and it's called Thunderbolt. It's making its appearance on new MacBook Pro models and it's promising 10Gb/second transfer rates. That's dual-channel, too so you'll get 10Gb/sec both to and from your devices. Apple suggests this will be useful for external RAID arrays, Gigabit Ethernet adapters, and also mentions support for "FireWire and USB consumer devices" along with HDMI, DVI, and VGA over DisplayPort. Apple expects that Thunderbolt will be "widely adopted as a new standard for high performance I/O," but we think the USB 3.0 crew might have a thing or two to say about that. Full PR is embedded below.

Update: Intel has thrown up its page on the technology, and it looks like the Light Peak name is officially no more. Intel indicates this speed will be enough to transfer a full-length HD movie (roughly 10 - 20GB in size) in less than 30 seconds. Intel also reinforces that this is compatible with existing DisplayPort devices and it also uses the PCI Express protocol for enhanced compatibility. Daisy-chaining will be possible, along with bus-powered devices, and cables can be made using either optical or electrical construction.

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Intel: Light Peak is ready for implementation, but it's built on copper

Vlad Savov — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 14:14:00 -0500

It's the classic good news / bad news dichotomy: Intel's highly anticipated Light Peak interconnect is totally ready for implementation into consumer devices, but its present iteration is based on communications over boring old copper wire instead of fiber optics. The company's David Perlmutter says transmissions over copper turned out "surprisingly better" than expected and that it'll prove plentiful for the majority of user needs today. Yeah, maybe, but we don't suffer bouts of gadget lust based on our needs, it's our wants that keep us up late at night dreaming of dual-core smartphones and tablet-optimized Androids. Then again, it's not like the 10Gbps optical option has been dismissed out of hand, it's just that we'll probably have to keep on waiting for it for a little (or a big) while longer.

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Intel Light Peak on track for release in first half of 2011?

Vlad Savov — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 05:01:00 -0400

10Gbps. In both directions. At the same time. That's been the tantalizing promise of Intel's Light Peak optical interconnect, and now we're hearing its penchant for speed is overflowing into the company's roadmap. CNET cites a source familiar with developments behind the scenes in reporting that Light Peak is expected to arrive in the early part of next year, slightly accelerating the already known plans for delivering the technology at some point in 2011. We've already been graced with a set of Light Peak-enabled prototypes, so you could've guessed things were gathering pace, but it's always good to get the odd bit of anonymous confirmation that things are moving along swiftly. And hey, when Light Peak hardware finally drops, we can just switch gears and start salivating over improvements that'll lift that 10Gbps ceiling even further.

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Intel demonstrates Light Peak on a laptop, says 10Gbps speeds are only the beginning

Joseph L. Flatley — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:56:00 -0400

Folks in Brussels for Intel's European research showcase got to get their hands on the company's Light Peak this week, with the first demonstration of the optical cable technology running on a laptop. Outfitted with a 12mm square chip that converts the optical signal into data the machine can read, two separate HD video streams were piped to a nearby TV, which displayed them with the help of a converter box -- a necessary evil until the Light Peak chips are developed for the display side of things. According to Justin Rattner, Intel's CTO, the current 10Gb / second speeds are just the beginning. "We expect to increase that speed dramatically. You'll see multiple displays being served by a single Light Peak connection. There's almost no limit to the bandwidth -- fibers can carry trillions of bits per second."

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Intel says Light Peak coming next year, can and will coexist with USB 3.0

Sean Hollister — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:52:00 -0400

How do you sell a generation of hardware manufacturers on yet another standard? If you're Intel, you tell them that it'll transfer files at 10Gbps and is compatible with every major protocol that came before... and if that doesn't work, you simply fail to give your competitor hardware support. But PC World reports that while Intel is still dragging its feet regarding USB 3.0, it's planning to have Light Peak fiber optic devices in the market next year. Intel insists Light Peak isn't meant to replace USB, in so much as it can use the same ports and protocols (photographic evidence above), but at the same time it's not shying away from the possibility of obliterating its copper competition with beams of light. "In some sense we'd... like to build the last cable you'll ever need," said Intel's Kevin Kahn. Now, we're not going to rag on Light Peak, because we honestly love the idea of consolidated fiber optic connectivity. We just want to know now whether we should bother locking ourselves into a USB 3.0 ecosystem if better things are just around the corner.

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