Intel and Apple to launch Light Peak as Thunderbolt in the MacBook Pro

This could be very nice, but the big question will be how long it takes the accessory manufacturers to bring compatible products to market.

In the mean time I would much rather have an eSATA/USB combo port available to use 'legacy' devices. For reasons that are not abundantly clear, Apple have not adopted eSATA which offers vastly superior performance to that of Firewire 800. eSATA will remain useful for a very long time in my view.

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that thunder is a sound and not a bolt? I'm sure the word "thunderbolt" is used by high school sports teams (and was used by a now-defunct XFL team from Birmingham, AL) but it's stupid. Thunder makes a clap and lightning makes a bolt.

This sort of fits in with comments I made in an earlier post.

Upgrading from Mini DisplayPort to something Light Peak-based allows them to push far more than just video over the connection. Adding Thunderbolt means they can roll out new external monitors that have FaceTime cameras, USB ports, and other things built-in, and you just need to plug in one cable to your MBP to serve all of that. Heck, they could even start doing fancier things; imagine they sell an external monitor with a discrete GPU built-in, and instead of pushing DisplayPort signal over Thunderbolt, they push PCI-E lanes to talk to the video card inside the monitor. When you're plugged in, you've got a bigger monitor AND faster graphics. Light Peak can do 10Gb/s, and 4x PCI-E is 8Gb/s, so even pushing a 4x PCI-E lane over it they could still have 2Gb/s left over, which is enough for a couple USB 2.0 lanes and a FireWire lane.

PCI-E is hot-pluggable, so it shouldn't be too hard to rejigger MacOS to support adding and removing PCI-E video devices like this; you'd need some kind of Nvidia Optimus-like video switching technology to support on-the-fly switching between the onboard and discrete graphics, but it's doable. In fact, since Light Peak can carry just about anything it's fed, it could possibly be switchable enough to either carry DisplayPort video from the onboard GPU (if your monitor is Thunderbolt-enabled but lacks a discrete GPU) or PCI-E (if your monitor is Thunderbolt-enabled and has a discrete GPU) depending on what's needed.

Apple's DisplayPort implementation already allows for multiple uses of a single DisplayPort connector; on the 27" iMac, you can use the single DisplayPort connector on the back as either an output (to add a second monitor) or an input (to receive a signal from another DisplayPort device, turning your iMac into an external monitor). DisplayPort is packet-based technology, and if it's flexible enough to at least do this, then I imagine they can make the port flexible enough to detect Thunderbolt and do bidirectional output as well.

Yay a new version of ADC, well kind of, hope this one gets off to a good start, and doesn't fizzle out after just a few years. I always liked the simplicity that the original cinema displays offered.

Thuderbolt is Light Peak's Indian name.

Building this into the mini-display port makes sense: an external monitor is one of the most common things to plug into a laptop, and already has the infrastructure for power, housing USB/ethernet/whatever ports.

So in theory, they could have a new Cinema Display that cuts down the connectors to power and LightPeak, but provides more functionality than the current three-connector (power, USB, mini-display) setup.

You gotta agree, lightpeak is a better name than thunderbolt.

-shrug- no one thought much of the names wii or ipad either I suppose but we got over it.

we can only hope it is finally here, that and that they haven't dumbed it down, plugging in some esata or whatever will be a blessing.

Kelly - the image on the blog listed in this article is just a mini DisplayPort with a lightning bolt 'shopped onto it.