Re: Thunderbolt-Sonnet’s Echo™ Express PCIe 2.0 Expansion Chassis with Thunderbolt™ P
I'm anticipating we won't be seeing "cards" as we know them at all in the future.
Imagine a non-descript box or even another computer with nothing but Pro Tools DSP muscle in it that connects via a single Thunderbolt connector to the host computer. (Even a laptop!)
So instead of my current system of a breakout PCI card into a huge and fragile chassis with six cards in it, I would have a single Thunderbolt connector going to another computer or black box that contained 2x, 4x or 10x the DSP power that I've had for 10 years.
Bandwidth wise, we're talking 10Gbps which is vastly more than all those gigabit ethernet based solutions. And if I'm not mistaken, this is also way more bandwidth than the PCIe solutions we're using now.
Thunderbolt made the all the video guys' jaws drop when they saw how much uncompressed HD video they can shove down the pipes, but I just dreamed about how much real-time DSP us Pro Tools guys can process. Surely these overly expensive and cumbersome PCI cards are finished?
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