Wondering why Apple’s Thunderbolt cable from iFixit has a price tag of $50? Well, the answers are out now. A teardown of the cable revealed how it contains 12 individual chips and a certain amount of resistors and other electronic-y type bits. The main focus however is on two Gennum GN2033 chips, one located at each end.
Such expensive components are required in order for the cable to operate with the high speed that it can work at. Gennum’s chip is the first ever in-connector 10Gb/s transceiver chip made for thunderbolt. The testing of the chip made clear that it allowed reliable data transfer at cutting edge speeds over low cost, thin gauge copper cables.
Talking of compatibility with future Thunderbolt cables in Macbook Pro and iMac, “smart” cabling has got it covered. At present only iMac and Macbook Pros from Apple have the Thunderbolt technology. Intel has planned to merge older ports and cables into one in the future.
With so many chips and electronic tit bits, Thunderbolt is being called new computer brain.
But people’s reaction to this has not been so good. Lovers of HDBaseT are comparing the both. Same speed, same functionality as Thunderbolt, it is as much cheap as Cat6 cables.
Thunderbolt is actually at thundering prices, isn’t it?
