Lightening Speed for Data Transfer

The time and age for USBs have come and gone, well that is according to Apple who has fully implemented Intel’s thunderbolt technology in their refreshed MacBooks.

This new technology formerly known as light peak which made its debut on MacBooks on the 25th of February and will soon be available on pc but at first, only a developer’s kit with an add-in card will be available for PCs have given us a new way to connect peripheral devices such as monitors and drives and its technology is expected to take over from USB. According to mashable.com “the difference between light peak and Thunder bolt is that in light peak used copper wires.” Thunderbolt devices and peripherals are expected to hit the market in the spring this year.

No longer will we have to wait 15 minutes to transfer just one gigabyte, Intel has created a new technology that will transfer ten gigabytes in just 30 seconds! That speed is about twice as fast as USB 3.0 and 20 times faster than USB 2.0. To confirm its speed Intel said thunderbolt can “transfer a full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds and back up 1 year of continuous MP3 playback in just over 10 minutes.”

One might ask what are the upgrades from USB 3.0? The major upgrades from USB 3.0 is that thunderbolt provides 10 watts of power to peripherals, compared with 8 watts for FireWire 800 and 5 watts for USB 3.0, thunderbolt is also bi-directional meaning it and transfer data to and from thunderbolt capable device at once the final major upgrade as stated before is the transfer speed. Another question that might pop to the minds of readers is how does this program does its’ work?  Well it’s a bit complicated, the Thunderbolt transceiver has two tiny light emitting lasers (Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers [VCSELs]) and two tiny photo detectors built in. The lasers are the width of two human hairs placed side-by-side. They can transmit light over each (of the two) channels using fiber-optic cable one hundred twenty-five (125) microns wide. The photo detectors receive the light from the other end and circuitry within the Thunderbolt interface converts those to electrical (wired) signals. In a nutshell it uses lasers to convert images to electrical signal hence the speed.