Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
are there PCI thunderbolt cards for mac pro 3.1?
If and when we see Thunderbolt PCI cards for Windows based towers, we'll probably see them for the Mac Pro as well.
It's crazy how out of balance the universe can seem when the low-end and mid-range parts of the Apple product lines have access to all the newest and fastest storage and professional video I/O options, no?
If there is a redesign of the Mac Pro coming then why not give us some hope, make the announcement, take pre-orders and put a little life back into the pro market.
Great idea!
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Thank you Bad Dog. Apple has dropped the ball on the graphics guys and many pro users and seem to be pushing them away if their in need of high end systems. I also do video and audio and there are many advantages with Thunderbolt. All my PCIe slots are full and Apple has never included that many anyway. Now with new Mac Pro not having Thunderbolt built in, it seems to be our only hope for Thunderbolt PCIe cards. With FireWire audio interfaces, latency is a problem that Thunderbolt could fix.
Once upon a time, there were six slots in the tower. We saw that go away with the arrival of the G3 processors (circa 1999 or so). Of course, around the same time we saw Apple commit heavily to the pro video market.
Ironically, while it is genuinely a depressing time right now if you need Final Cut Pro and/or a tower for high end work, it's never been a better time to be using a low end machine.
Putting more than one bus on a single logicboard means if the logicboard goes, so does the expansion with it.
Putting more than one bus on a hard drive bridge board means if the bridge board goes, so does every bus on it, and adds to the expense of building the board.
This means hard drives that are purely USB, or purely Firewire, or purely Thunderbolt are cheaper to manufacture than ones that try to mix all the interfaces. This makes the Mac Pro the ultimate not-all your eggs in one basket option for expansion, if someone were to make a PCIe Thunderbolt card. It would then allow purely thunderbolt drives and other peripherals to form. As long as one machine has no thunderbolt expansion option it will cause manufacturers to hesitate to make thunderbolt devices. This I see why Firewire never took off, as hardly any PC maker decided to use 6 pin or 8 pin Firewire. So the first person to make Thunderbolt able to be on a PCIe card, will drive the industry to better expansion options.
There is a technical reason with the design of the Mac Pro that makes Thunderbolt impossible to add, I forget the exact details but it seems a massive redesign of the internals, or at least a future Intel Xeon chipset, would be needed to allow a true Thunderbolt equal to the port in the other Macs to be added.
This makes sense. I'm sure there is a redesign of the Mac Pro going on as we type!
"Without processor graphics there's no clean way to route DisplayPort through Thunderbolt on a Xeon platform just yet. At some point processor graphics will come to the Xeon however..."
Read more here...
There will never be a Thunderbolt card. TB is integrated into the system, it ties directly into the CPU and on-cpu GPU.
There will never be a Thunderbolt card.
Please explain why you think so. Thunderbolt is basically PCI on a wire. So there's no reason at all why a PCI expansion card couldn't be made. It essentially wouldn't be much more than a passthrough card plugged into a PCI slot.
Please read more than seven words of my prior post for your answer.
There is at least one PCIe to Thunderbolt card in the works - whether that results in a card release, no way to know - what with how difficult and expensive it is to work with Intel on developing Thunderbolt products. But for a MacPro there is no reason at all for a PCIe to Thunderbolt PCIe card to incorporate the GPU.
"In the works", you mean like the multiple TB breakout boxes announced but never released?
there is no reason at all for a PCIe to Thunderbolt PCIe card to incorporate the GPU
Except that its an integral part of TB's design specs. If it can't do that Intel and Apple won't licence it.
Ever notice FireWire was never licensed to junk products or ones that didn't meet all the specs? Such as there were never any 1600 or 3200 FireWire cards.
TB connects directly to the PCIe controller (directly to the CPU on Ivy Bridge models). Thats why TB products can be hot-plugged. Any kind of PCIe card would be little more than a pass-through for the lanes the card occupies, which means turning off the computer to change any peripherals.
In reality, there is absolutely no need for TB on a MacPro.
Need another Ethernet/USB/FireWire/Video port? Add a card.
Want fast external storage? Get an eSATA-III card. TB won't be any faster because the drive is still limited by the SATA interface in the enclosure.
All Apple's other models have TB because they have no possible internal expansion options. Thats what TB was designed to compensate for.
Please read more than seven words of my prior post for your answer.
What makes you think I didn't? I explained quite clearly how easy it would be to create such a card. Now tell my how I may be wrong instead of just telling me to read your post again.
I have never seen anything that looked remotely like "easy" to design and implement and "plug 'n play" and that they rely on motherboards and processor also being able to.
Did I miss a link to such? Wiki or Anandtech or Ars? Intel preferrably.
are there PCI thunderbolt cards for mac pro 3.1?
