Sonnet Shipping First New Thunderbolt 2 PCIe Expansion Chassis
Sonnet today announced the first Thunderbolt 2 expansion chassis, allowing owners of late 2013-era MacBook Pro and Mac Pro models to add two or three PCIe cards to their machines.
There are three new options, desktop and rack mount three-slot chassis, plus a two-slot desktop version.
The Echo Express III-D, Echo Express III-R, and Echo Express SE II incorporate ultra-fast Thunderbolt 2 technology, which delivers twice the throughput of 10 Gb/sec Thunderbolt and provides sufficient bandwidth to support many of the highest-performance and most-demanding PCIe cards. The new expansion chassis support every kind of Thunderbolt-compatible PCIe card available — enabling the use of professional video capture, audio interface, 16Gb and 8Gb Fibre Channel, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, SAS and SATA HBA, and RAID controller cards with Thunderbolt-enabled iMac®, Mac® mini, Mac Pro®, MacBook Air®, and MacBook Pro® computers. Plus, the Sonnet systems' dual Thunderbolt 2 ports support full-bandwidth connectivity with Thunderbolt 2-equipped host computers, full backward compatibility with 10 Gb/sec Thunderbolt-equipped computers and devices, and daisy-chaining of other Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt devices.
Customers who purchased Thunderbolt 1 equipped expansion chassis can get free upgrades to the Thunderbolt 2 version. All the Thunderbolt 2 chassis are fully backwards-compatible with older Thunderbolt equipped Macs.
The desktop three-slot version is available for $979, the rack mount three-slot is $1,199, and the two-slot desktop is $499.
Popular Stories
iOS 18 is expected to be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history. Below, we recap rumored features and changes for the iPhone. iOS 18 is rumored to include new generative AI features for Siri and many apps, and Apple plans to add RCS support to the Messages app for an improved texting experience between iPhones and Android devices. The update is also expected to introduce a more...
The first approved Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator for the iPhone and iPad was made available on the App Store today following Apple's rule change. The emulator is called Bimmy, and it was developed by Tom Salvo. On the App Store, Bimmy is described as a tool for testing and playing public domain/"homebrew" games created for the NES, but the app allows you to load ROMs for any...
Apple today said it removed Game Boy emulator iGBA from the App Store for violating the company's App Review Guidelines related to spam (section 4.3) and copyright (section 5.2), but it did not provide any specific details. iGBA was a copycat version of developer Riley Testut's open-source GBA4iOS app. The emulator rose to the top of the App Store charts following its release this weekend,...
Game emulator apps have come and gone since Apple announced App Store support for them on April 5, but now popular game emulator Delta from developer Riley Testut is available for download. Testut is known as the developer behind GBA4iOS, an open-source emulator that was available for a brief time more than a decade ago. GBA4iOS led to Delta, an emulator that has been available outside of...
A week after Apple updated its App Review Guidelines to permit retro game console emulators, a Game Boy emulator for the iPhone called iGBA has appeared in the App Store worldwide. The emulator is already one of the top free apps on the App Store charts. It was not entirely clear if Apple would allow emulators to work with all and any games, but iGBA is able to load any Game Boy ROMs that...
Last September, Apple's iPhone 15 Pro models debuted with a new customizable Action button, offering faster access to a handful of functions, as well as the ability to assign Shortcuts. Apple is poised to include the feature on all upcoming iPhone 16 models, so we asked iPhone 15 Pro users what their experience has been with the additional button so far. The Action button replaces the switch ...
Top Rated Comments
F-that...
Don't see many of these moving...
There really should a Thunderbolt usage for beginners FAQ on here somewhere and if there is, it should be linked on every thunderbolt article for easy reference.
Thunderbolt2 offers 2 x 10Gbit/s channels combined. Thunderbolt offers them as seperate channels. Neither of those speeds offer anywhere near the bandwidth of a 16xPCie card and even then, most higher end GPUs are double-wide and need internal power. You'd end up using 2 slots for 1 card, leaving only 1 PCIe slot for other uses and then cripple the card with bandwidth that doesn't even come close to 4xPCIe.
The audience is defined by the need to use PCI cards and the purchase of a TB or TB2 equipped computer.
Price doesn't determine audience for any product. It that were true, college students wouldn't be carrying around rMBPs and the iPhone wouldn't be the top selling US handset with AT&T the biggest telco.
The idea that only a professional would buy expensive equipment is just wrong, along with the idea that home users and gamers are all poor and couldn't possibly be able to afford things they want.
Considering that most desktop PCs offer PCI expansion slots for free, and they are faster than TB2, a professional is more likely to invest in the product that gives maximum return for minimum outlay - in which case 'professionals' wouldn't be buying this product at all.
This is expensive because it is a niche product in terms of utility, not because 'professionals' are willing to pay the asking price.
Graphics cards work fine in windows in every current mac except for the Mac mini , there is no OS X driver support yet. I was one of the few people who set up a geforce Titan over thunderbolt to a MacBook Pro when the last version first came out.
Again, these are for professionals.
--
I'm going to assume this can't handle higher-end video cards on PCI Express 3.0? Still not enough bandwidth.