Comment on Intel announces Thunderbolt 5 with double the bandwidth (40 Gbps to 80 Gbps)
stevestevesteve@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Does anything even use thunderbolt 4’s bandwidth? About the only thing I’ve seen is external GPUs and even that is a ludicrously niche use case.
I’d be much more excited about a post about something using TB4 to its fullest. All I can think reading this title is “who cares?” Is someone going to make a reasonably priced and even remotely convenient 40gbps ethernet card for TB5? No. Do my NVME drives go past 40gbps? Generally not, but I could’ve seen use for fast drives plugged into tb4/5 at least. Is anyone using TB4/5 for datacenter interconnects where this speed would actually be useful? I doubt it.
Does anyone reading this post use tb4 on a daily basis?
stevehobbes@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Storage and creative use cases, 100%. If you have several TBs coming off each camera per day, you will 100% feel the pain.
Just driving two 4K monitors at 40Gbps is pretty much all of the bandwidth of TB3, assuming you’re doing 10b 120hz.
A modern NVMe can easily do 50-60Gbps per drive.
stevestevesteve@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Driving two 4k monitors at 10b120hz is pretty overkill to use thunderbolt for, is kind of my point. Is anyone actually being limited by that?
Even with cameras, the storage generally isn’t that fast. CFexpress cards cant generally break 2GB/s, and even 8+k cameras generally record to that or maybe USB-C (and if you’re recording to a USBC device you’re probably just gonna use USBC instead of thunderbolt).
NVMe that can do sustained write speeds like that will be full in a few minutes, unless you’re offloading to a massive high speed array over 10+gbit networking it just kind of seems like why bother?
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of going to faster interfaces for the sake of speed, but I have experienced almost zero real use of thunderbolt in real life, and I usually keep a pretty good eye out. My real question was mostly focused on whether there are people actually using thunderbolt and if they’re actually limited by 40gbps and I’m kinda just bitching at this point
stevehobbes@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Enterprise NVMe drives can do sustained writes of 7GB/s no problem. That’s 58Gbps plus overhead.
That’s to a single drive.
If you are a film crew connecting and ingesting multiple raw 8k 120hz video to be edited, this is very useful
As to whether they use USB4 v2 or thunderbolt, I’m not sure it matters. They look pretty similar, but with thunderbolt it’s very easy to know what the interface is capable of. Good luck when something says “USB 4”.
USB-C is just a connector - thunderbolt uses the exact same connector.