5 replies to this topic

[ergot]

Anyone knows about a TB PCIe card available and working  in ML?
Also what is the best compatible USB3 PCIe card?
Thanks
  

[3.14r2]

I doubt if such thing already exist, cos' the thunderbolt motherboards (for PC) have just started to appear.

[djohnsto77]

Thunderbolt is too fast to put into a PCie card, so I doubt it'll ever happen. It's also the reason Apple has had problems getting Thunderbolt into its Mac Pros due to its design.

ergot, on 15 October 2012 - 05:27 PM, said:

Also what is the best compatible USB3 PCIe card?

See my post here : Orinico Card

[s0niqu3]

Hi,

I've been doing a lot of research on thunderbolt lately, and basically , thunderbolt is an external pci-express interconnect. And it's not really a matter of speed, if your specific motherboard and CPU combination could theoretically activate an additional x4 slot (the current dual-port thunderbolt motherboards use 4 pcie lanes from the PCH/NorthBridge directly connected to the controller), you'd have enough bandwidth.

The real problem though, and the reason you're unlikely to ever see a pcie thunderbolt card is that the specification from intel requires that thunderbolt can carry a display signal, and do so without using a jumper cable connected to a discrete GPU. Both Asus and ASRock were originally planning on releasing a thunderbolt "add-in" card for a wide range of their newest z77 motherboards, but as they required an external jumper cable to carry the graphics signal from a discrete GPU to the thunderbolt controller, intel denied them thunderbolt certification.

This is also the most likely reason why apple hasn't added thunderbolt to the Mac Pro, since they lack integrated/onboard graphics.

[DJenkins]

May not be exactly what you are after, but Atto are now making adapters. If you got a PCIe sas raid card you could connect one of their devices to a thunderbolt storage array.

So in theory you would have thunderbolt going into PCIe... sort of

http://www.attotech....amily.php?id=15

[s0niqu3]

DJenkins, on 23 October 2012 - 01:33 PM, said:

May not be exactly what you are after, but Atto are now making adapters. If you got a PCIe sas raid card you could connect one of their devices to a thunderbolt storage array.

So in theory you would have thunderbolt going into PCIe... sort of

http://www.attotech....amily.php?id=15

Hi,

I think you've got that backwards, looking at that site, those all take thunderbolt input, and convert them to some other output (fiber channel, SAS/SATA, or GBE connections) and not the other way round, so they don't actually provide thunderbolt output..