You actually have more room to resize the dock in OS X than the taskbar in Windows. Its kind of a pain because I'm on a 27" monitor which has a higher DPI than a standard display, and I'd really like to increase the size of the Windows 7 taskbar a little bit more.
As you said, text remains an issue. Once resolution independence finally gets rolled into these OSes then it'll be fine.
They have fixed dpi scaling in Windows 7 so that everything scales properly.
The only problems are with some very old programs but they are few and far between.
Just type 'dpi' in the start menu search then click 'Set Custom text size'
Then importantly make sure the checkbox 'Use Windows XP sytle DPI scaling' is UN-checked.
If you have a program that you don't want to scale you can right click on the program shortcut (or exe) go to properties > Compatibility then check 'Disable display scaling on high DPI settings'
Everything gets bigger actually. EVERYTHING. Windows has FULL scaling support.
I am using a 1920x1080 Z11 so I know that pretty damn well. You don't make the task bar bigger by hand. You just boost the interface DPI and the windows, the fonts, the buttons everything adjusts perfectly.
That's not true. Windows 7 and Linux scale perfectly well. IN FACT! It scales better than the phone software, which actually does not scale on iOS and Android and use pixel doubling and that sort of stuff.
Windows and Linux are resolution independent.
OSX on the other hand cannot scale well, but it's not like if you were running OSX on a PC.
My wife has the Z with the 1080p screen (work-purchased computer). The resolution is not usually a problem in Windows (you can adjust the dpi settings), but some programs don't scale properly even with the setting adjusted. Still, the display is beautiful. It makes the screen on my Toshiba R705 look like crap - which it is. Here's my outlook on this new model:
Good Moves: - Removing the optical drive, which is rarely used - Dumping the GeForce 330m, which is barely faster than Sandy Bridge integrated graphics. - Making it thinner and lighter due to the above.
Bad Moves: - Making the screen bezel 4 times as large in their quest to make it thinner. - Making the external GPU so overpriced. It's not worth consideration unless you absolutely need support for three external monitors, since it won't be powerful enough for seriously GPU intensive tasks anyway.
Very true. $2000 for a laptop is not a large sum of money for many places of employment. And needless to say, I'm also jealous of her machine! I have the poor-man's version, the Toshiba R705, which cost $699 at the time. Speed-wise, it does everything I need (core i3 + 4 GB of RAM). And it weighs a similar 3 lbs. But the screen is total crap. I couldn't justify spending triple the money for the Vaio Z for my own personal use.
Plus, she's had a nightmare of a time dealing with Sony support. An unworldly awful experience. As I've said before, stop staring at the shiny Sony laptop and RUN, run away. Your hard earned cash will only buy you grief if anything should go wrong with it.
Not sure where you got the idea that the 330M is barely faster than HD3000. It scores quite a bit higher in benchmarks according to notebook check. The 330M did come underclocked on Z but it seems people have had no problems with keeping it at manufacturer or overclocked levels on the Z forums.
I stand corrected. I was thinking of the 320M, which Anandtech reviewed against Intel's HD3000 graphics. Indeed, it looks like this laptop has lost about 1/2 of it's GPU muscle with this new iteration.
I was about to say. I have a 330M and I can play a good game of Bad Company 2 on it. low to med settings. It looks better then the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions.
However the 5650 in my girlfriends dell is noticably more powerful.
At least one person played with something like this over at Hardocp a year or two back. IIRC with a top of the line card in his external box he took an average framerate hit of ~30% vs the card in a desktop.
Well, I would like to recall that ThunderBolt's bandwidth is 10Gbps in each direction, while each lane in PCIe2.0 is 500MB totally only no matter in or output.
Total effective throughput of ThunderBolt should be probably around 5 lanes of PCIe 2.0.
Each PCIe 2.0 lane is 5 Gbps, full-duplex, but uses 8b/10b encoding, so the payload is only 500 MBps. Thunderbolt provides two 10 Gbps, full-duplex channels, or the equivalent of 2 x PCIe 2.0 x2. Not surprisingly, the host controller is connected via a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface.
The HD 3000 is on die though, so it probably doesn't face much in the way of bandwidth issues--it just generally lacks in compute power. A fast GPU, however, might run in to bandwidth problems pretty quickly over Thunderbolt, especially if the TB host controller is pulling its 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes off of the PCH.
"Light Peak" was the code name while under development. "Thunderbolt" is the trademarked (originally by Apple, but transferred to Intel,) name for the technology.
Let's get the terminology straight. Sony is obviously not entitled to associate the trademarked term ”Thunderbolt” to these products, or put the Thunderbolt logo on them. Because they obviously do not match the specification. The connector is wrong, it does not carry Displayort, et cetera.
So whatever Sony is using, it is not "Thunderbolt". If it was Thunderbolt, it could be connected to a Macbook Pro.
Light Peak, unfortunately, in some Intel marketing material has ben equated to Thunderbolt. More reasonably Light Peak is a more general term associated to the underlying Intel (and partners) technology used in both Tunderbolt and "Sony Light Peak".
If Sony associates a name to the protocol used between this Vaio model and its docking station, it will be a third name, neither Light Peak, nor Tunderbolt.
Yeah, looks like so. Sony just said this technology is based on Light Peak technology. The actual port is called docking station/USB port like I pointed out. It needs a better name though...
Both use Light Peak, which is a OSI layer 2 protocol controller. They use different layer 1 physical interconnects. It was named Light Peak, I would assume, because it came out of Intel's silicon photonics research. Intel's original intent was to use an optical layer 1 physical layer, but it was too expensive, so they punted and used the Light Peak controller with an electronic physical layer.
They don't yet quite have all of the necessary silicon photonics blocks ready. Eventually, and especially now that silicon nano-scale lasers have recently been demonstrated, they will build the photonics physical layer into the Light Peak controller. Once the laser, detector, and optics can be built on a standard CMOS process, the optical physical layer will become cheap and widespread. It should be scalable to 1 Tbps. I expect the first generation will be at least 50 Gbps, which they have already demonstrated. Most likely, we will see this used as a chip-to-chip link in place of an electronic bus at some point, as it would require far less power to drive than an electronic bus.
It's a half-assing of it. Light Peak was called LIGHT Peak because it was optical, and it was going to scale up to much faster speeds than Thunderbolt is advertising.
But Intel reneged and just said, "nah, plain old copper again." And called it a day.
They made some stupid statement about adding fiber in the future, but how naive are they pretending to be? As if getting vendors to adopt a new port isn't a monumental enough task; they think they're going to do it all over again in a year or two?
I wish somebody would put an InfiniBand port on a laptop and have that connect to an external GPU unit that could fit in a desktop GPU. Mellanox recently announced the ConnectX-3 which takes in a PCIe 3.0 8x connection and outputs 1-2 FDR 56Gbps InfiniBand ports. Since PCIe 3.0 8x runs at 64Gbps, one InfiniBand port at 56Gbps will pretty much saturate the ConnectX-3's connection to the CPU. What this will give you in a sense is an external GPU that could run at virtually a PCIe 2.0 16x connection (64Gbps) between itself and the CPU, more than enough for today. Then just make sure you backfeed the display signal and you have a simple solution that does exactly what you want, cheap desktop performance when you are near an outlet, which is where most laptops gamers will find themselves since gaming on battery greatly reduces performance and up-time.
One meeeelion dollars! It sure does make Apple seem almost reasonable by comparison.
I like the idea of an external dock/gpu, but I wish it more more like Dell's Latitude D series docks. Besides the absolutely ridiculous price, Sony should know that this user will never, never buy another laptop without an IPS screen. Apparently, only Lenovo got that memorandum.
Lenovo has not got the importance of screen quality. Their screens are really bad on everything bigger than 12".
They punish the 14" models with worse quality than the 15" when you get to contrast and gambut, and IPS is only an option on 12".
Even the 1080p W series with high gambut, cant reproduce all of the colors in the sRGB spectrum correctly. Its goes above and beyond in some areas into Adobe RGB yes, but in other areas, it just shows the wrong colors....
I would say, across their lineup, their screen is their weakest area...
No kidding. My 15" work Lenovo Thinkpad has what must be the worst laptop screen every invented. There is no such color as a dark blue on this screen, the closest you get is sky blue. The contrast ratio is so bad it can be difficult to read black and white text even though the POS 15" screen is only 1366x768. Further, if you tilt the screen just a few degrees off ideal viewing angle, the picture gets WORSE fast.
As soon as someone is able to confirm the Echo Express works for gaming on a 2011 macbook pro, I am buying one for a lot cheaper than this, and going to get a lot more performance.
Im assuming hes talking gigabytes per second instead of bits.
Either way, people should be able to pull 15 to 20k 3dmark06 scores over thunderbolt. A lot better than stock laptop cards which are in the 5k to 8k average range.
Everything I've read claims that the dock can support three displays on its own, plus the one built in to the notebook.
I only see two outputs, HDMI and VGA. That's a pretty crappy choice. Yes, HDMI has gotten better (finally supporting more than 1920x1080,) but neither option will support any of the 30" displays out there right now. (Since I haven't seen any that support the higher-resolution-over-HDMI.)
They really need to get up with the times and put two DisplayPort on there (plus an HDMI.) They can use adapters to get VGA or DVI; and if they use Mini DisplayPort (which *IS* a standard now, with no royalties for the physical plug,) they can easily fit them on.
I'm *REALLY* tired of Sony's "Not Invented Here" syndrome. They may have won with Blu-ray, but come on, the mDP plug is an open standard, and is the 'standard' connection for Thunderbolt, already embraced by a few third parties. Why re-invent the wheel with an incompatible (and unapproved by the USB-IF) plug?
Three external displays total, or all three on the dock? The former could be done by using one of the laptop's video out connectors (it also has 1 each VGA and HDMI) for the third external screen.
Another thing worth mentioning for people that use their gpus on the go... I fear pushing my laptop to the max all of the time, reduces the life span of my laptop battery.
I look forward to things like this so the GPU heat is not right next to my battery, and being pushed over my motherboard, but it is created outside of my machine. The internal cooling system should be able to keep up better, at least one would think...
While it's true that Thunderbolt is 10Gb/s, Apple implements two channels, each at 10Gb/s. I thought that was the standard implementation. If so, can't both be used for these external GPu solutions? That would give more bandwidth than needed.
1 of the channels is a PCIe channel and 1 of the channels is for display data usage (the actual DisplayPort). Presumably Sony is using both already. PCIe to get data to the external GPU, the DP channel to get the image back.
Ummm... no. TB specifies two 10 Gbps channels per port and one or two ports per controller. Apple used two ports on the 27-inch iMacs and one port on all the other TB equipped Macs, but all of the ports provide two channels at 10 Gbps, full-duplex.
Also, according to Intel, the TB transport layer is designed specifically to support the multiplexing of PCIe and DP packets on the same link. The two protocols are not necessarily on separate channels.
The problem is that I don't believe you can create a TB compliant device that uses all the bandwidth of both channels (i.e. effectively all of the TB host controller's PCIe 4x connection), because the dual-channel architecture is designed to always allow a path for downstream devices. So you can really only expect PCIe x2 type bandwidth (equivalent to AGP 4x) for external GPU applications from the first generation of Thunderbolt.
I'd check what stepping of the Cougar Point chipset Sony are using before buying. I just bought (end of May) a Vaio S (similar form factor as the Z) and it's using a B2 stepping chipset with devices connected to SATA ports 3 and 4.
When I contacted Sony about this, they at first denied there was an issue. Then when presented with documents from Intel about the issue, they have said they pointed me to a FAQ on their site which says that it is not an issue. Unfortunately, my model is not listed as being unaffected. Sony then said that that document needs updating. Sony said that someone would contact me in three to five working days. It's day 4.
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I thought the governing body behind USB objected to Intel trying to use the USB port for Thunderbolt which is why Intel switched to a miniDP port in their final implementation. So did Sony manage to get approval from the USB Implementors Forum where Intel failed or did Sony just do it anyways, which means there may be legal challenges coming? At the very least the USB Implementers Forum could rescind Sony's permission to use USB trademarks, logo, and branding for this non-standard port since they can't guarantee compatibility.
Light Peak was developed as an optical fibre based connection, and Thunderbolt is the copper wire based version of this high speed interface protocol and hardware. Maybe Sony plans to use a faster than 10 Gb per sec. bidirectional 20 Gb. Maybe they are planning to us a much faster optical "Light Peak" connection.
The display port form factor that thunderbolt uses is a copper wire based connection that apple decided to make use of as their chosen connector type that is probably a dual use implementation of a pin for pin match with display port type plugs, and some extra pins for the thunderbolt part. Intel originally used a modified usb type form factor to demo thunderbolt. However, an optical type Light Peak fiber optic cable would not be compatible with any type of copper wire based port or existing port type.
It's a very small connector, that. I doubt there are any extra pins. And the plan is to support both optical and electrical over a dual mode port in future implementations. Optical and electrical can be combined on a port without conflict. In fact, the audio line in/out jacks on pretty much all Macs shipped in the last few years have been hybrid electrical/optical stereo mini jacks.
I continue to not fully grasp the nature of Thunderbolt’s “dual-channel” architecture. If TB ports are electrically the same as mDP, and Intel is still only using the four differential pairs of the DP main link for data, that would in turn equal two sets of send/receive pairs for full-duplex operation. Are these the two “channels” (akin to PCIe lanes), or are the channels implemented in the transport layer and striped across physical link lanes (a la DP)?
If the point of the dual-channel architecture is to provide a way to ensure bandwidth for devices further down the chain, can one even build a TB device that is intentionally an end node that uses bandwidth from both channels?
Also, if my theory were correct about there only being two sets of send/receive pairs, what in the heck is the signaling rate on the cable in order to provide a full 10 Gbps of usable bandwidth to the upper layers? It would have to be something like 1080 MHz or double the rate of DP 1.2!?
In any event, both the PCI and DP transport protocols use 8b/10b encoding, so even if TB provides them a full 10 Gbps of bandwidth per channel, you’re still down to 1 GBps of throughput before you factor in any other type of overhead. For graphics applications that would equate to AGP 4x speeds.
More like 2x in the case of Intel HD 3000. As underpowered as it may seem compared to the current crop of GPUs, I'd reckon the HD 3000 could be bottlenecked if connected to an AGP 2x bus. Of course it's on die with the processor, though, so bus bandwidth is never really an issue.
If you're going to compare with the mba 13", then I think it is important to show that the mba has a 16:10 resolution. For this reason alone I would choose the macbook air.
and more pixels to fit in that better proportion... I feel like they should bring the air screen over to the 13" and let the customer decide what body they prefer.
... a very nice product. No useless dedicated GPU. nice resolution. light + ssd. Can't say much about it. But the price is just sick. I'm also considering a Thinkpad t420s which would cost about the same but with better specs and I woudl get it with about 30% rebate...
We had to return our recent purchase Sony SB lappy and ended up with the X220 Lenovo....Sonys implementation of the external output was fuber.....even directly attaching a LCD left the screen looking crap, which was a real shame as we lived everything else about the laptop.
Once again, Sony tries to undermine an industry standard by using a horseshit connector. This time it's Thunderbolt, the connections for which they've buried in a USB PORT.
And the "Light Peak" name died when Intel reneged on half the thing, the half that carried the light. Is Sony seriously using that name?
For a company that has waded through one PR debacle after another, Sony never seems to learn.
The Sony representative, in a video by Engadget, claims that Sony's version *is* using an *optical* (e.g. light) based connection. The Sony rep might be misinformed, but if this is true, it might provide more speed than the copper-based implementation that Apple is using (aka Thunderbolt). Pure speculation at this point, but I'm curious to see how this shakes out and whether this will be the beginning of a trend in external GPUs for laptops.
LightPeak and its' slower Thunderbolt (copper wire variant) are not an industry standard. They were developed by Intel and not the other players in the industry. As we all know from the VHS versus Beta max, Bluray versus HD-dvd etc., adopting industry standards can be much like a cat fight, a lot of screaming and clawing to establish dominance in alley behind the fish market. So before feelings of betrayal cloud this discourse, Intel demonstrated Thunderbolt using a usb style connection when it first introduced the copper wire based variant.
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Wellll ive been reading up on all this info about all kinds of eGPU's and their connections being crappy and slow. So can someone tell me what is needed? in laymans terms?
Basically I reallllly like the idea that the sony vaio z has this "power media dock" what i dont like is the fact that its a shitty GPU inside it compared to what is best and badass for 2011 now 12...soooo is there now or going to be a connection that can handle a hardcore eGPU? If not what is needed to make this possible.
The idea of having an ultralight ultra portable powerful laptop with SSD's is cool...adding a dock that turns it into a killer desktop system that can game with the best and watch the stock market on 2 more screens is friggin FANTASTIC...but the Z only does game with the cough cough "past"
So can you guys tell me whats needed to make this dream of mine a reality?
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DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
1920x1080 on a 13" screen? Major eye strain.Exodite - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
In a world where 3.5" screens with 960*640 resolutions are heralded as the holy grail I don't think it's an issue.Sure, phone are held close to the face than a laptop but not /that/ much closer.
Personally I'd settle for an affordable 22-27" display with a 2560x1600 resolution.
joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
But os software is not made to scale with high dpi like phone software is.iphone 4 has much higher dpi, but you can still see your tool bars and menus in your software just fine.
The same is not always true in windows or osx. ie. The red close button in osx gets really small very quick...
joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
same with photoshopquiksilvr - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
What are you talking about? You can make icons and text larger just fine on Windows 7. You can even make the taskdock at the bottom larger if need be.joer80 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Some things do get bigger, but not everything. I never said you couldnt change icon or task bar size.KoolAidMan1 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
You actually have more room to resize the dock in OS X than the taskbar in Windows. Its kind of a pain because I'm on a 27" monitor which has a higher DPI than a standard display, and I'd really like to increase the size of the Windows 7 taskbar a little bit more.As you said, text remains an issue. Once resolution independence finally gets rolled into these OSes then it'll be fine.
iamezza - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
They have fixed dpi scaling in Windows 7 so that everything scales properly.The only problems are with some very old programs but they are few and far between.
Just type 'dpi' in the start menu search
then click 'Set Custom text size'
Then importantly make sure the checkbox 'Use Windows XP sytle DPI scaling' is UN-checked.
If you have a program that you don't want to scale you can right click on the program shortcut (or exe) go to properties > Compatibility then check 'Disable display scaling on high DPI settings'
zoubido - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Everything gets bigger actually. EVERYTHING.Windows has FULL scaling support.
I am using a 1920x1080 Z11 so I know that pretty damn well. You don't make the task bar bigger by hand. You just boost the interface DPI and the windows, the fonts, the buttons everything adjusts perfectly.
zoubido - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
That's not true. Windows 7 and Linux scale perfectly well.IN FACT! It scales better than the phone software, which actually does not scale on iOS and Android and use pixel doubling and that sort of stuff.
Windows and Linux are resolution independent.
OSX on the other hand cannot scale well, but it's not like if you were running OSX on a PC.
I suppose you're an OSX user ;-)
TrackSmart - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
My wife has the Z with the 1080p screen (work-purchased computer). The resolution is not usually a problem in Windows (you can adjust the dpi settings), but some programs don't scale properly even with the setting adjusted. Still, the display is beautiful. It makes the screen on my Toshiba R705 look like crap - which it is. Here's my outlook on this new model:Good Moves:
- Removing the optical drive, which is rarely used
- Dumping the GeForce 330m, which is barely faster than Sandy Bridge integrated graphics.
- Making it thinner and lighter due to the above.
Bad Moves:
- Making the screen bezel 4 times as large in their quest to make it thinner.
- Making the external GPU so overpriced. It's not worth consideration unless you absolutely need support for three external monitors, since it won't be powerful enough for seriously GPU intensive tasks anyway.
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Damn, where does your wife work? I wouldn't mind getting a Vaio Z from my employer...Zoomer - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
It's not that uncommon. Even universities would buy them. A few grand for a computer is nothing.TrackSmart - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Very true. $2000 for a laptop is not a large sum of money for many places of employment. And needless to say, I'm also jealous of her machine! I have the poor-man's version, the Toshiba R705, which cost $699 at the time. Speed-wise, it does everything I need (core i3 + 4 GB of RAM). And it weighs a similar 3 lbs. But the screen is total crap. I couldn't justify spending triple the money for the Vaio Z for my own personal use.Plus, she's had a nightmare of a time dealing with Sony support. An unworldly awful experience. As I've said before, stop staring at the shiny Sony laptop and RUN, run away. Your hard earned cash will only buy you grief if anything should go wrong with it.
vicbdn - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Not sure where you got the idea that the 330M is barely faster than HD3000. It scores quite a bit higher in benchmarks according to notebook check. The 330M did come underclocked on Z but it seems people have had no problems with keeping it at manufacturer or overclocked levels on the Z forums.http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-330...
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-300...
The 6650M is what's barely faster than the 330M, if anything.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6650M.4...
The new Z is quite a disappointment imo. At this rate, my next laptop upgrade will have to be Apple. Seems windows manufacturers can't get it right.
TrackSmart - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I stand corrected. I was thinking of the 320M, which Anandtech reviewed against Intel's HD3000 graphics. Indeed, it looks like this laptop has lost about 1/2 of it's GPU muscle with this new iteration.SlyNine - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I was about to say. I have a 330M and I can play a good game of Bad Company 2 on it. low to med settings. It looks better then the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions.However the 5650 in my girlfriends dell is noticably more powerful.
zoubido - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
unfortunately the apples have their quirks too.the 15" are extremely hot heavy and noisy
the MBA are very sexy but the screen resolution and connectivity is just bad.
if it wasnt for the resolution and the little pluses of the Z i guess i'd go for the mba or even the asus that's going to be out in sept.
the i7 ulv seems pretty good these days
Wieland - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I had a virtual boy growing up; what is this eye strain you speak of?Seriously though, you can just bump the scale to 125 or 150% if your eyes aren't good enough for the future. I'm sick and tired of 1366x768 screens.
Broheim - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
I'm really looking forward to seeing what kind of performance we're going to see with a eGPU over thunderbolt (and light peak in the future).Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Take a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-g...It shows GTX 480 in PCIe x4 slot. In most games, there is no difference but in e.g. MW2 it drops by around 50%.
Uritziel - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
And ThunderBolt is currently roughly a mere 2.5 lanes of PCIe 2.0. Not promising.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
1x pcie 2.0 is not bad...joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
check out the group over at notebook review kicking tail over the express card slot at 1x. Google eGPU experiences.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
ie. x4 PCIe 2.0 is the same as x8 PCI 1.0 , and x2 1.0 is giving good numbers over express card already.james.jwb - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Anand, can you change the domain name to joer80tech.com, So many posts.:)
joer80 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
I like the topic. :DDanNeely - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
At least one person played with something like this over at Hardocp a year or two back. IIRC with a top of the line card in his external box he took an average framerate hit of ~30% vs the card in a desktop.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
going from 1 1x to 1 2x is huge though.EclipsedAurora - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Well, I would like to recall that ThunderBolt's bandwidth is 10Gbps in each direction, while each lane in PCIe2.0 is 500MB totally only no matter in or output.Total effective throughput of ThunderBolt should be probably around 5 lanes of PCIe 2.0.
repoman27 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Each PCIe 2.0 lane is 5 Gbps, full-duplex, but uses 8b/10b encoding, so the payload is only 500 MBps. Thunderbolt provides two 10 Gbps, full-duplex channels, or the equivalent of 2 x PCIe 2.0 x2. Not surprisingly, the host controller is connected via a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface.dagamer34 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
It's still FAR faster than an Intel HD 3000, which is what it's competing against.repoman27 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
The HD 3000 is on die though, so it probably doesn't face much in the way of bandwidth issues--it just generally lacks in compute power. A fast GPU, however, might run in to bandwidth problems pretty quickly over Thunderbolt, especially if the TB host controller is pulling its 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes off of the PCH.CharonPDX - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Thunderbolt *IS* Light Peak."Light Peak" was the code name while under development. "Thunderbolt" is the trademarked (originally by Apple, but transferred to Intel,) name for the technology.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Sony talked about it as Light Peak. I know they are the one and the same and I have no clue why Sony didn't say Thunderbolt.jantangring - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Let's get the terminology straight. Sony is obviously not entitled to associate the trademarked term ”Thunderbolt” to these products, or put the Thunderbolt logo on them. Because they obviously do not match the specification. The connector is wrong, it does not carry Displayort, et cetera.So whatever Sony is using, it is not "Thunderbolt". If it was Thunderbolt, it could be connected to a Macbook Pro.
(1) http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/ind...
Light Peak, unfortunately, in some Intel marketing material has ben equated to Thunderbolt. More reasonably Light Peak is a more general term associated to the underlying Intel (and partners) technology used in both Tunderbolt and "Sony Light Peak".
If Sony associates a name to the protocol used between this Vaio model and its docking station, it will be a third name, neither Light Peak, nor Tunderbolt.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Yeah, looks like so. Sony just said this technology is based on Light Peak technology. The actual port is called docking station/USB port like I pointed out. It needs a better name though...Jaybus - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Both use Light Peak, which is a OSI layer 2 protocol controller. They use different layer 1 physical interconnects. It was named Light Peak, I would assume, because it came out of Intel's silicon photonics research. Intel's original intent was to use an optical layer 1 physical layer, but it was too expensive, so they punted and used the Light Peak controller with an electronic physical layer.They don't yet quite have all of the necessary silicon photonics blocks ready. Eventually, and especially now that silicon nano-scale lasers have recently been demonstrated, they will build the photonics physical layer into the Light Peak controller. Once the laser, detector, and optics can be built on a standard CMOS process, the optical physical layer will become cheap and widespread. It should be scalable to 1 Tbps. I expect the first generation will be at least 50 Gbps, which they have already demonstrated. Most likely, we will see this used as a chip-to-chip link in place of an electronic bus at some point, as it would require far less power to drive than an electronic bus.
MobiusStrip - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
They pulled the same BS with their bastardization of Firewire, creating a four-pin Firewire connector that didn't carry power.Sony: We can't invent it ourselves, so we'll adopt the technology but ruin its chances by not meeting its standards.
Broheim - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
light peak was intended to use fiber, they changed the name because the first gen uses copper instead...light peak = optical
thunderbolt = electrical
thunderbolt and light peak is the same protocol, but not the same technology!
McDave - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Neither.Thunderbolt is a productisation of Light Peak delivered via Mini Display Port
MobiusStrip - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Light Peak included optical. They dropped the name when they dropped the optical component.jantangring - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
No, Intel says about Thunderbolt: ”This high-speed data transfer technology features the following: [...] Electrical or optical cables”http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/ind...
MobiusStrip - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
It's a half-assing of it. Light Peak was called LIGHT Peak because it was optical, and it was going to scale up to much faster speeds than Thunderbolt is advertising.But Intel reneged and just said, "nah, plain old copper again." And called it a day.
They made some stupid statement about adding fiber in the future, but how naive are they pretending to be? As if getting vendors to adopt a new port isn't a monumental enough task; they think they're going to do it all over again in a year or two?
Moronic.
AggressorPrime - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
I wish somebody would put an InfiniBand port on a laptop and have that connect to an external GPU unit that could fit in a desktop GPU. Mellanox recently announced the ConnectX-3 which takes in a PCIe 3.0 8x connection and outputs 1-2 FDR 56Gbps InfiniBand ports. Since PCIe 3.0 8x runs at 64Gbps, one InfiniBand port at 56Gbps will pretty much saturate the ConnectX-3's connection to the CPU. What this will give you in a sense is an external GPU that could run at virtually a PCIe 2.0 16x connection (64Gbps) between itself and the CPU, more than enough for today. Then just make sure you backfeed the display signal and you have a simple solution that does exactly what you want, cheap desktop performance when you are near an outlet, which is where most laptops gamers will find themselves since gaming on battery greatly reduces performance and up-time.ckryan - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
One meeeelion dollars! It sure does make Apple seem almost reasonable by comparison.I like the idea of an external dock/gpu, but I wish it more more like Dell's Latitude D series docks. Besides the absolutely ridiculous price, Sony should know that this user will never, never buy another laptop without an IPS screen. Apparently, only Lenovo got that memorandum.
joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Lenovo has not got the importance of screen quality. Their screens are really bad on everything bigger than 12".They punish the 14" models with worse quality than the 15" when you get to contrast and gambut, and IPS is only an option on 12".
Even the 1080p W series with high gambut, cant reproduce all of the colors in the sRGB spectrum correctly. Its goes above and beyond in some areas into Adobe RGB yes, but in other areas, it just shows the wrong colors....
I would say, across their lineup, their screen is their weakest area...
ckryan - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
That's true. Their 12" X series IPSs are supposed to be "stellar enough" that I'd consider getting a 12" laptop just for a better screen.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
That is sad that we have to consider going that small to be able to make things that look correctly.. :Dseapeople - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
No kidding. My 15" work Lenovo Thinkpad has what must be the worst laptop screen every invented. There is no such color as a dark blue on this screen, the closest you get is sky blue. The contrast ratio is so bad it can be difficult to read black and white text even though the POS 15" screen is only 1366x768. Further, if you tilt the screen just a few degrees off ideal viewing angle, the picture gets WORSE fast.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
As soon as someone is able to confirm the Echo Express works for gaming on a 2011 macbook pro, I am buying one for a lot cheaper than this, and going to get a lot more performance.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
If apple will get it together and offer the 13" macbook pro with the same screen resolution as the 13" inch macbook air, it would be perfect. :Dhenrymazza - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
> but you only get a maximum of 1.25GB/s of bandwidth to/from the GPUwhere did you get this?
joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Im assuming hes talking gigabytes per second instead of bits.Either way, people should be able to pull 15 to 20k 3dmark06 scores over thunderbolt. A lot better than stock laptop cards which are in the 5k to 8k average range.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
1.25GB/s = 10Gb/sCapital B makes a big difference ;)
CharonPDX - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Everything I've read claims that the dock can support three displays on its own, plus the one built in to the notebook.I only see two outputs, HDMI and VGA. That's a pretty crappy choice. Yes, HDMI has gotten better (finally supporting more than 1920x1080,) but neither option will support any of the 30" displays out there right now. (Since I haven't seen any that support the higher-resolution-over-HDMI.)
They really need to get up with the times and put two DisplayPort on there (plus an HDMI.) They can use adapters to get VGA or DVI; and if they use Mini DisplayPort (which *IS* a standard now, with no royalties for the physical plug,) they can easily fit them on.
I'm *REALLY* tired of Sony's "Not Invented Here" syndrome. They may have won with Blu-ray, but come on, the mDP plug is an open standard, and is the 'standard' connection for Thunderbolt, already embraced by a few third parties. Why re-invent the wheel with an incompatible (and unapproved by the USB-IF) plug?
joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
They probably sell a $50 splitter. :PDanNeely - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Three external displays total, or all three on the dock? The former could be done by using one of the laptop's video out connectors (it also has 1 each VGA and HDMI) for the third external screen.Penti - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
It's limited to 1920x1200 still, in GPUs. So not having DP is a huge downside.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Another thing worth mentioning for people that use their gpus on the go... I fear pushing my laptop to the max all of the time, reduces the life span of my laptop battery.I look forward to things like this so the GPU heat is not right next to my battery, and being pushed over my motherboard, but it is created outside of my machine. The internal cooling system should be able to keep up better, at least one would think...
claytontullos - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
The GTX 590 is the fastest card available.I agree though that for $500+ dollars the dock should have come with a better GPU.
claytontullos - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
The dock as is has to be at least 50% profit given it's other components.Dvd drives go for about $20-$30 these days.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Changed it to single chip GPU, as GF110 is the fastest.joer80 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Yeah, pretty disappointing... maybe they thought putting the 1 gig number on it would trick people.claytontullos - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
nevermind...melgross - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
While it's true that Thunderbolt is 10Gb/s, Apple implements two channels, each at 10Gb/s. I thought that was the standard implementation. If so, can't both be used for these external GPu solutions? That would give more bandwidth than needed.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
1 of the channels is a PCIe channel and 1 of the channels is for display data usage (the actual DisplayPort). Presumably Sony is using both already. PCIe to get data to the external GPU, the DP channel to get the image back.repoman27 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Ummm... no. TB specifies two 10 Gbps channels per port and one or two ports per controller. Apple used two ports on the 27-inch iMacs and one port on all the other TB equipped Macs, but all of the ports provide two channels at 10 Gbps, full-duplex.Also, according to Intel, the TB transport layer is designed specifically to support the multiplexing of PCIe and DP packets on the same link. The two protocols are not necessarily on separate channels.
The problem is that I don't believe you can create a TB compliant device that uses all the bandwidth of both channels (i.e. effectively all of the TB host controller's PCIe 4x connection), because the dual-channel architecture is designed to always allow a path for downstream devices. So you can really only expect PCIe x2 type bandwidth (equivalent to AGP 4x) for external GPU applications from the first generation of Thunderbolt.
melgross - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
That's too bad. If both channels could be combined the way Express lanes can be, that would open up a number of higher speed devices.LiamC - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
I'd check what stepping of the Cougar Point chipset Sony are using before buying. I just bought (end of May) a Vaio S (similar form factor as the Z) and it's using a B2 stepping chipset with devices connected to SATA ports 3 and 4.When I contacted Sony about this, they at first denied there was an issue. Then when presented with documents from Intel about the issue, they have said they pointed me to a FAQ on their site which says that it is not an issue. Unfortunately, my model is not listed as being unaffected. Sony then said that that document needs updating. Sony said that someone would contact me in three to five working days. It's day 4.
Be very careful.
ViRGE - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
3 and 4 are the safe ports, right? If so, what's the problem?LiamC - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
No 0 and 1 are the safe ports. Port 0 is connected to the HDD. Port 4 is the DVD player. 3 looks to be the SD/Memory Stick/Card reader.ArteTetra - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Please, include metric units in your articles and news.Souka - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Does this help?SI base units:
Quantity Unit Symbol
length meter m
mass kilogram kg
time second s
electric current ampere A
thermodynamic temperature kelvin K
amount of substance mole mol
luminous intensity candela cd
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SI prefixes:
Prefix Symbol Multiplication factor
yotta Y 10^24
zetta Z 10^21
exa E 10^18
peta P 10^15
tera T 10^12
giga G 1 000 000 000 109
mega M 1 000 000 106
kilo k 1000 103
hecto h 100 102
deka da 10 101
deci d 0.1 10-1
centi c 0.01 10-2
milli m 0.001 10-3
micro µ 0.000 001 10-6
nano n 0.000 000 001 10-9
pico p 10-12
femto f 10-15
atto a 10-18
zepto z 10-21
yocto y 10-24
ArteTetra - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
???No, it doesn't help, it's pretty unrelated actually.
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
I thought the governing body behind USB objected to Intel trying to use the USB port for Thunderbolt which is why Intel switched to a miniDP port in their final implementation. So did Sony manage to get approval from the USB Implementors Forum where Intel failed or did Sony just do it anyways, which means there may be legal challenges coming? At the very least the USB Implementers Forum could rescind Sony's permission to use USB trademarks, logo, and branding for this non-standard port since they can't guarantee compatibility.melgross - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
That's correct. The USB organization is being shortsighted. People are blaming Apple for this, but it isn't their fault.HyptnoToad - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Light Peak was developed as an optical fibre based connection, and Thunderbolt isthe copper wire based version of this high speed interface protocol and hardware.
Maybe Sony plans to use a faster than 10 Gb per sec. bidirectional 20 Gb. Maybe
they are planning to us a much faster optical "Light Peak" connection.
Conner_36 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Really? Another type of thunderbolt port? What's wrong with the mini display port?Way to ruin a standard before it's even started.
Tbrick - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
The display port form factor that thunderbolt uses is a copper wire based connectionthat apple decided to make use of as their chosen connector type that is probably
a dual use implementation of a pin for pin match with display port type plugs, and
some extra pins for the thunderbolt part. Intel originally used a modified usb
type form factor to demo thunderbolt. However, an optical type Light Peak fiber
optic cable would not be compatible with any type of copper wire based port or
existing port type.
repoman27 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
It's a very small connector, that. I doubt there are any extra pins. And the plan is to support both optical and electrical over a dual mode port in future implementations. Optical and electrical can be combined on a port without conflict. In fact, the audio line in/out jacks on pretty much all Macs shipped in the last few years have been hybrid electrical/optical stereo mini jacks.MobiusStrip - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
They pulled the same BS with their bastardized Firewire connector, which was a four-pin version that didn't carry power.Sony attempts to undermine pretty much any standard that they can.
repoman27 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I continue to not fully grasp the nature of Thunderbolt’s “dual-channel” architecture. If TB ports are electrically the same as mDP, and Intel is still only using the four differential pairs of the DP main link for data, that would in turn equal two sets of send/receive pairs for full-duplex operation. Are these the two “channels” (akin to PCIe lanes), or are the channels implemented in the transport layer and striped across physical link lanes (a la DP)?If the point of the dual-channel architecture is to provide a way to ensure bandwidth for devices further down the chain, can one even build a TB device that is intentionally an end node that uses bandwidth from both channels?
Also, if my theory were correct about there only being two sets of send/receive pairs, what in the heck is the signaling rate on the cable in order to provide a full 10 Gbps of usable bandwidth to the upper layers? It would have to be something like 1080 MHz or double the rate of DP 1.2!?
In any event, both the PCI and DP transport protocols use 8b/10b encoding, so even if TB provides them a full 10 Gbps of bandwidth per channel, you’re still down to 1 GBps of throughput before you factor in any other type of overhead. For graphics applications that would equate to AGP 4x speeds.
joer80 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
AGP 4x speeds? So 1000x intel graphics?repoman27 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
More like 2x in the case of Intel HD 3000. As underpowered as it may seem compared to the current crop of GPUs, I'd reckon the HD 3000 could be bottlenecked if connected to an AGP 2x bus. Of course it's on die with the processor, though, so bus bandwidth is never really an issue.joer80 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
People are getting more than double HD 3000 out of the express cards...Brad4 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
If you're going to compare with the mba 13", then I think it is important to show that the mba has a 16:10 resolution. For this reason alone I would choose the macbook air.joer80 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
and more pixels to fit in that better proportion... I feel like they should bring the air screen over to the 13" and let the customer decide what body they prefer.Gondorff - Sunday, July 3, 2011 - link
Umm... read the article? The Z has far more pixels: 1600x900 standard, 1920x1080 optional. No other laptop brand will get you that.I would also definitely prefer 16:10, but the extra resolution is a reasonable compromise.
beginner99 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
... a very nice product. No useless dedicated GPU. nice resolution. light + ssd.Can't say much about it. But the price is just sick.
I'm also considering a Thinkpad t420s which would cost about the same but with better specs and I woudl get it with about 30% rebate...
SolMiester - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
We had to return our recent purchase Sony SB lappy and ended up with the X220 Lenovo....Sonys implementation of the external output was fuber.....even directly attaching a LCD left the screen looking crap, which was a real shame as we lived everything else about the laptop.SolMiester - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Oh, model was VPCSB17GGBWolfpup - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
It would be very compelling... (assuming it used normal drivers).Interesting that Sony's the first to really do something with Lightpeak.
MobiusStrip - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Once again, Sony tries to undermine an industry standard by using a horseshit connector. This time it's Thunderbolt, the connections for which they've buried in a USB PORT.And the "Light Peak" name died when Intel reneged on half the thing, the half that carried the light. Is Sony seriously using that name?
For a company that has waded through one PR debacle after another, Sony never seems to learn.
TrackSmart - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
The Sony representative, in a video by Engadget, claims that Sony's version *is* using an *optical* (e.g. light) based connection. The Sony rep might be misinformed, but if this is true, it might provide more speed than the copper-based implementation that Apple is using (aka Thunderbolt). Pure speculation at this point, but I'm curious to see how this shakes out and whether this will be the beginning of a trend in external GPUs for laptops.EblerbabusBlabUm - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
LightPeak and its' slower Thunderbolt (copper wire variant) are not an industry standard. They were developed by Intel and not the other players in the industry.As we all know from the VHS versus Beta max, Bluray versus HD-dvd etc.,
adopting industry standards can be much like a cat fight, a lot of screaming
and clawing to establish dominance in alley behind the fish market. So before
feelings of betrayal cloud this discourse, Intel demonstrated Thunderbolt
using a usb style connection when it first introduced the copper wire based
variant.
az1234 - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
cool,we like it .thankshelol05 - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
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scottyagreen - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Wellll ive been reading up on all this info about all kinds of eGPU's and their connections being crappy and slow. So can someone tell me what is needed? in laymans terms?Basically I reallllly like the idea that the sony vaio z has this "power media dock" what i dont like is the fact that its a shitty GPU inside it compared to what is best and badass for 2011 now 12...soooo is there now or going to be a connection that can handle a hardcore eGPU? If not what is needed to make this possible.
The idea of having an ultralight ultra portable powerful laptop with SSD's is cool...adding a dock that turns it into a killer desktop system that can game with the best and watch the stock market on 2 more screens is friggin FANTASTIC...but the Z only does game with the cough cough "past"
So can you guys tell me whats needed to make this dream of mine a reality?