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Comment by blakespot | Hacker News Reader

It's Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter that amazes me. That little $29 thing is a full PCI-e device --- there is a PCI-e interface and a FireWire chipset built into the housing. And the little cable has a huge number of individual cables inside of it.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbo...

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It's just a repeater chip[set]. For something that competes with USB it's a pretty bad price. You can get pretty powerful CPUs for half that or less.

No, it's just as the parent describes: A Thunderbolt-to-PCIe bridge chip, a short PCIe connection, a PCIe Firewire host chip, and a microcontroller to coordinate.

Thunderbolt is PCIe.

I have fixed my post to not imply it's only a single chip. It being multiple important chips should cause the opposite of amazement. It means that the product wasn't important enough to get a dedicated chip, which is probably the main reason it costs $29 instead of also being $9.

And Firewire is not related to PCIe at all, so the adapter clearly is not just a repeater. If you want to say something along the lines of"it's just a Firewire host adapter chip + some conversion, doesn't have to be expensive", then say that.

It's shoveling bits through basically unchanged. It's a repeater with a different electrical standard on each side. 90% of the effort is in the transceivers.

Here is a teardown of this little $29 device. Take a look...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-thunderbolt-to-fi...

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