Avago-Earo wrote:Is Thunderbolt like a souped up Firewire? I remember seeing Audio recording interfaces that used firewire before USB took over. They seemed to be better (faster, less latency) from what I've read
It's got more in common with eSATA, in that it extends the internal communication interface normally only available on your motherboard outside the system. SATA is the cables you use to connect your HDD to your MOBO, eSATA is SATA cables that go outside your case, any HDD you plug into will run at full speed as if it were inside your case. Thunderbolt is similar for PCIx (Though it's not literally that, it's very close to that). PCIx is what your graphics cards, sound cards and the like use to communicate, and thus Thunderbolt has very little overhead and runs much faster than USB or Firewire as it talks directly the same language GPUs already expect.
USB and Firewire both have to go through chips that then get sent to the PCI bus and there is more overhead because of it. Firewire still has lower latency than even USB 3 (And USB 2 is low latency than USB 3 in some cases as well), but USB 3 is faster than Firewire by a good amount. Only PCIx and Thunderbolt are faster than USB 3.
This explanation is of course simplified.