USB 4 can already do 80 gbit, why are they even bothering with a competing standard anymore?
Intel announces Thunderbolt 5 with double the bandwidth (40 Gbps to 80 Gbps)
Submitted 1 year ago by tst123@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.macworld.com/article/2064049/intel-thunderbolt-5-bandwidth-speeds.html
Comments
ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hypx@kbin.social 1 year ago
That's USB4 v2.0, not USB4. It's not the same thing.
ArtVandelay@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ugh…Find me one more naming standard on this entire fucking planet more screwed up than USB
girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like USB 4 has a 120Gbps asymmetric mode as well. That’s wild!
sznio@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Can you connect PCI-E devices to USB 4? That feels like the only useful feature of Thunderbolt imo.
notepass@feddit.de 1 year ago
Yes. The full USB-4 spec has that.
That being said: thunderbolt is still great for verification. If it says thunderbolt you exactly know what it can do and that it should work as expected. USB-4 will be plastered on anything that can do only plain usb4 speeds.
ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yep. It’s also fully compatible with all Thunderbolt 4 functionality. arstechnica.com/…/breaking-down-how-usb4-goes-whe…
MooseBoys@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Can we just switch to optical interfaces already?
kalleboo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thunderbolt optical cables exist if you need them, and for anyone who doesn’t the extra cost of the optical interface is a waste.
WaxedWookie@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
Are you implying that needing a cable more than 1m long is an edge case rather than the norm that should be covered by the standard?
Dfy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
But then you would need fiber glass cables, put it in your bag/pockets by itself and you have to buy another one
stevehobbes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You still need copper unless you don’t want to transmit power too.
Interestingly, fiber technically has more latency than copper - light moves slower through fiber than electrons through copper.
hungover_pilot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nice. I’m interested to see how eGPUs perform on TB5.
stevestevesteve@lemmy.world 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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
Techmaster@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Why is Intel technology coming to Macs next year when Macs no longer use Intel chips? That makes no sense.
SimplePhysics@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Intel and Apple co-developed ThunderBolt, and the tech is free to use for all manufacturers, so why wouldn’t they? One more selling point on the spec sheet is always good.
Techmaster@lemm.ee 1 year ago
If it was free to use then AMD would support it too. I didn’t realize Apple was involved with it too, I thought it was Intel’s IP. Weird for them to work together on that and then Apple gives Intel the finger like they did.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Really, my question is why ThunderBolt isn’t more widely adopted?
__dev@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Apple still uses intel chips in all their macs, just not for the CPU. The M1 Macbook for instances uses an Intel JHL8040R thunderbolt 4 chip.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Apples part of the group backing AV1, along with Intel too. Huh.
GregoryTheGreat@programming.dev 1 year ago
That’s fast.
Player2@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Fast as a thunder bolt
elrik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thunder is actually quite slow being limited by the speed of sound.
obinice@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Apple really done want to just adopt the global standards of USB, do they xD
Anything they can do to feel special and squeeze more money out of their customers, forcing them to remain in a proprietary ecosystem and buy more stuff that only works with Apple products, etc
Brandon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Can someone please explain how this is possible? What advancements on the tech tree did we have to make to double the bandwidth which we couldn’t previously?
Turkey_Titty_city@kbin.social 1 year ago
It's the protocols more than anything.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
From what I recall, the big change is in the signal encoding. It’s switching from PAM2 to 3, which will allow a lot more data to move down the line without having to totally rethink the cables and connectors. Although you will need new cables for this.
weedazz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We made breakthroughs in recent yeara at harvesting alien technology from the crashed Roswell ships, leading to all of these “AI chips” and crazy speeds