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External Thunderbolt Graphics Card On Its Way
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing — but faster. The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop — and more importantly you need to carry around a second monitor to actually use a ViDock. So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?"
So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?
It's not exactly a gaming laptop... but it does have a Core i7 2ghz CPU, Radeon HD 6770M 1GB, 8GB of RAM, and a 17.3" LCD... Oh and when I get bored of gaming it also came with a BD-ROM.
Costco has them for $999 and I bought two :)
And machine with Thunderbolt already has a modern GPU, because it's integrated with the display port. Or they've added a Thunderbolt card to an old machine, but if they can add expansion cards then they can add a new GPU.
The new MacBook Pro already supports chaining two displays from the port, and I doubt this will be a very unusual feature for devices with Thunderbolt. I suppose this might be useful for adding a third one, but then you're really pushing the available bandwidth.
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Totally agree. I mean, a single connector that can drive a monitor, external disks, and a range of peripherals and is small enough to fit on something like a mobile phone? What possible use case is there for that?
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Thunderbolt is protocol agnostic. It's not meant to compete with USB, but express card. In fact you can run USB devices over thunderbolt.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You forgot the tag.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
You've completely missed the point. Don't think MacBook Pro, think the new Thunderbolt equipped MacBook Airs that lack a decent built in graphics card.
And to answer the summary's closing question: because it means I can carry an ultra-portable (MacBook Air) when I travel and plug it in at home to give it a much needed graphics boost for use at home.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
For docking stations and such. Plenty of us plop our laptop onto a docking station or a USB hub + monitor + speakers + keyboard + mouse anyway.
It beats the hell out of hauling an overpriced 10-pound beast to the same office desk every day, when you can just keep better equipment (with better ergonomics) neatly arranged and haul a lighter machine to/from work.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I'm not really sure how you manage to get from "[it] can't even handle two external screens" to "It [won't] handle ... an external graphics card".
I don't believe the former could you lead you to conclude the latter,
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop
For multi-GPU systems in current desktops at least, there's little to no performance penalty going from 16x to 4x.
For hundreds of years written English managed perfectly well without having to sign-post everything with tags.
I certainly got the sarcasm inherent in the gp's post, indeed it was more effective without the silly sign-posting.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Apple should simply integrate a modern GPU in their monitors: there's room to properly cool down and the monitor becomes the definitve docking station. It would also justify the price, even if it's slightly increased.
I remember it (for the really early Macs), Wikipedia mentions it (no footnote), and I have an old SCSI spec' for it (and SCSI Ethernet) around somewhere.
Sounds like more of the same. Connect a general-purpose interface to a box with some limited resource (no I/O slots in the original Mac, and only a few dedicated mass storage slots in most current portables) and there will be someone to use the GP interface to run a display.
Not a bad idea, just not terribly original.
AMD released this kind of product before - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_XGP . It was generally considered to be a failure, partially because the software support was not perfect, and partially because people just didn't want to lug a dock / GPU box around. The hardware bandwidth was more satisfying, though, at 8 PCIe lanes and not 4 like Thunderbolt.
I find it amusing that the same ideas return and return in this industry, presented as an innovation every single time.
It isn't exactly protocol agnostic, it's essentially an external 4x PCIe cable. Assuming the device in question doesn't flip out at finding itself a bit further than usual from the PCIe controller, there is certainly a lot of stuff you can plug in to it(with the addition of a case and one of those fancy custom Intel converter chips); but it isn't "agnostic"...
One RAID box? Their are several now, Lacie released one a couple of weeks back. Apple also have their Thunderbolt display, you might want to look at what it does.
Thunderbolt is not competing against USB either.
I just don't understand the purpose of a high end gaming laptop. It's always quite more expensive than the equivalent desktop; and ultimately you're playing with a small screen, a cramped keyboard, and an imprecise pointing device, in a far less comfortable way... unless you plug the laptop to an external screen, keyboard, and mouse, so what was the point of a portable anyway?
Circumcision is child abuse.
They are bloody heavy and expensive. And when you drop it in an airport... :sob: (x-Alienware laptop owner).
This seams like an interesting idea, get a mid-range laptop (£500 will get you an i5 with a smallish screen) and then add this and a nice big monitor for home use. That way I can get a the odd game of TF2 and about and get my work done while out and about, but get home and play something a little more taxing.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
More interesting is whether CUDA would run across this interface. Running a Tesla board (or just a Fermi based GPU) from a laptop would be a major benefit for scientific research for which there is lots of CUDA accelerated software.
As someone else has already pointed out, it is not a competitor to USB.
As to the RAID box, well, something has to be first. But there are already three others I'm aware of:
There is already also a Sony laptop with a Thunderbolt connector to docking station which has an optical drive, a graphics chip, *and* USB 2.0 and 3.0 sockets. The newer Apple monitors, as well as the new iMacs, use it for USB and DisplayPort. The laptops with it can use a powered-down iMac as a monitor. You can't do a lot of that with USB.
As usual with technologies like this, as soon as it's integrated into chipsets and/or standard motherboards, the products will follow. Just the fact that Apple are selling hundreds of thousands of units with this integrated will help stimulate companies to produce more products that use it...
Um...
USB 2.0, even at its theoretical maximum is 20 x slower than Thunderbolt. USB3.0 at its theoretical maximum is 2 x slower. The thunderbolt architecture means that you get a full 10Gb/sec in both directions unlike USB which has so much processor overhead that you never get anywhere near its theoretical maximum. So no, USB is not "Almost as fast".
RS232 Serial ports used to be ubiquitous.
I'll take that bet. If only because they are still including firewire ports, and they have been useless for years and years and years. You must not earn very much to make such a bet.
The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop
My recent interest is hardware mpeg decoding to low resolutions like 1080 HDTV (I haven't owned a computer monitor smaller than 1600x1200 since the 90s, so HDTV does seem low res to me, both absolute res and especially by DPI).
I'm curious if "something like this" would have enough horsepower to be a mythtv frontend. My gut level guess is, "probably yeah". I love my mythtv system...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Apple hasn't marketed as such, as least not in this neck of the woods, but Thunderbolt is clearly a Docking port. The first one ever on a MacBook!! (That I know of)
Take a look at their new Thunderbolt display. With one cable connection, your MacBook gets network, sound, firewire, USB and power(!), all via your external Display. No need to attach a second cable.
Considering that Thunderbolt already is a DisplayPort connection, I don't see the benefit of connection a second graphics card over the PCI-e connection. Some says to have a more powerfull card, over 4x PCIs 2.0?, for games. However lots of suppliers have hard PCexpress (also on MacBooks) GFX cards, but none work with Macs because Apple wont play fair with regards to GFX drivers in OS X.
In the end, to be honest, I find it far more exciting that I can finally replace the 8 cables that I have to plug into my MacBook with just one.
Apple got it right with the new displays that act as a docking station, providing USB ports, gigabit ethernet, another thunderbolt port, etc. Add a graphics card to it and you have the perfect docking station.
Thunderbolt is a PCIe bus on a cable. USB isn't even playing the same game, let alone in the same league.
"Anybody else think thunderbolt is a technology looking for a solution?
USB is cheaper, almost as fast, and ubiquitous. There are probably literally millions of USB devices that work with a USB port."
I don't think you understanding the difference between TB and USB. TB is meant to replace PCIe, HDMI, SATA, etc. Just wait for the teamable 40gbit optical version that's coming out in a few years.
Let me ask you this hypothetical situation. Imagine you have a computer 10 years from now, it has no PCIe slots or anything like that. All it has is a bunch of USB ports and you connect your 64 teraflop videocard to your motherboard via the USB ports, your 4GB/sec SSD via USB, and your 2100p 36bit monitor via USB.
People would say that this is completely stupid because USB isn't meant for this situation and would be horrible. Well, TB *IS* meant for this, will do this, and will do it better than anything else that exists or has been announced.
I'm not sure if this would happen, but I could see it happening. TB will eventually switch to a fiber phys. Once it does that, it will have a cheap fiber connection that is good for 40/100gbit. Could you imagine if NICs adopted the connection? I'm not saying to also adopt the TB protocol, but just make use of the connection for a cheaply mass-produced 100gbit 100meter fiber phys.
10Gb/s? Only 10 Gb/s? They want to drive a low latency GPU on only 10Gb/s? I think they forgot the whole "computer thing" when they cooked up this piece of crap. Unless the GPU is a 7600GT, this is a useless idea. Any card within the last 2 generations consumes most of the PCIe 16x 2.0 bandwidth in texture and physics memory swaps(not transfer but swaps, latency makes a huge difference here). CUDA eats through that bandwidth like a starved bear. 10Gb/s? Freakin' useless, and not just because of the speed, but also the increased latencies.
Thunderbolt seems to get a lot of hate because it's marketed by Apple. Techies are quick to forget their main partner in this, who designed the technology, is Intel. I'm sure if Intel had released the technology off their own back it would have had the full support of the tech community, and would also have died within 6 months thanks to lack of use.
By going for the consumers via Apple first, this technology has the chance to thrive. It has a chance to gain some ground in the peripherals market, which it wouldn't have done if it was only found on high-end gaming PCs (see: eSata). Probably Intel will start putting TB ports on their motherboards soon-ish, and once those start appearing, the other mobo manufacturers will almost certainly follow.
So basically, odds are TB will still be going strong in two years. It could still fail of course, since nothing is really certain in this market (who's to say ATi won't come up with a competing standard?). But right now there's no reason to doubt Thunderbolt is a growing force in the world of plugging stuff in.
It would stupid because there's more then enough cables in a desktop already. If anything, we need LESS of cable solutions and more slots. Look up at what's missing inside laptops in comparison to desktops. Yeah.
Grandparent is exactly correct. This is a technology looking for a solution, or more correctly for a problem to fix. Because there simply isn't one at the moment.
it has an ATI 68000 inside the CPU
My Sega Genesis also has a 68000 inside the CPU. What's old is new again.
I just don't understand the purpose of a high end gaming laptop.
I can see two reasons. For one thing, unlike a desktop PC, a laptop can play video games while on an airplane or a Greyhound bus. For another, Chris Mattern mentioned LAN parties. (These wouldn't be quite as necessary if more PC games supported split-screen co-op, but that's a discussion for a different day.)
and ultimately you're playing with a small screen
It's far bigger than both screens of a Nintendo DS put together, or even a 3DS.
Ahh, all this talk of external PCIE reminds me of the ASUS XG Station, I had so much hope for that: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ces-asus-xg-station,4679.html Too bad :(
I don't see the benefit of connection a second graphics card over the PCI-e connection.
If you've ever tried to game on an Intel "Graphics My Ass", you would.
It sounds to me as though this is a case of "Just because something CAN be done, doesn't mean it SHOULD be done"
Thunderbolt is protocol agnostic.
No, it carries displayport and PCIe data. The protocol is very well defined.
In fact you can run USB devices over thunderbolt.
Provided that you wire in a PCIe -> USB chip on the other end. But it seems you can bridge any generic transport to any other, given sufficient will. Did you know you can get a USB to ISA bridge, for instance? It's even supported under Linux!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So Apple and Sony are backing it.... sign me up
There is a lot to be said for an external modular approach to computing, esp if you do a lot of field work where a desktop or transportable is not practical. I know several people who have to haul around lugables because they need some kind of functionality that only comes in expansion card form that thunderbolt could potentially replace. Plus, desktops already have slots, laptops do not. Maybe this would be less important for desktops, but for laptops this has been a long time coming.
*nods* in a lot of elitist's minds, Apple is just overpriced junk for stupid people.. thus anything Apple does must be bad/useless for 'real' users.
external pci-e is in the works and does not have the over head at Thunderbolt has and will not be Intel locked.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/look-out-thunderbolt-external-pci-express-spec-being-developed/6220
http://www.molex.com/molex/products/family?key=external_pci_express_pcie&channel=products&chanName=family&pageTitle=Introduction
http://www.andovercg.com/datasheets/molex-74546-0813.pdf
Thunderbolt may be good for external HDD's and other high data stuff. But for PCI-e add in cards and video cards better to go with pci-e also the mac's with on board video have like 8-12 unused pci-e lanes any ways so why not run a video card off of them as 1 video card just maxes out the Thunderbolt bus and still does not let it hit it's full power. Maybe in 2013 you can have a mac mini with a good cpu and a pci-e box with a good video card in it.
> If anything, we need LESS of cable solutions and more slots.
'Cause that's what consumers are looking for, great big huge desktops with loads of slots. That's what's filling the aisles at Best Buy.
No, the majority of consumers want tiny, unobtrusive PC's that they have to mess with as little as possible.
> Look up at what's missing inside laptops in comparison to desktops.
Uh-huh. That's why nobody buys laptops. Oh wait, laptops are almost more popular than desktops these days. If only there was some technology that would bring PCIe level expandability to laptops without eating up a bunch of space like ExpressCard...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I don't know if it can be fitted with an NVIDIA GPU board or not, but if it can...
CUDA.
Imagine a BitCoin mining rig with a few of these, and there's your application.
You may want to engage your brain and re-read my post. You're repeating my argument.
You have no damned idea what you're talking about. What we're looking at is an external PCIe bus and it's over twice as fast as USB 3.0, which is hardly "almost as fast". Let that sink in. Anything that can be put on a PCIe bus can be put on Thunderbolt. Now think about Intel's ultrabook push and how we're going to be seeing a lot more ultrathin laptops. These laptops aren't going to have a lot of real estate for ports. Now, what Intel tech is going to be ideal for universal docking stations, hmm? Let that sink in, then please stop posting. TB may not catch on for desktops, but it has a lot of potential for laptops.
We over at notebook review have been working on an external GPU solution for a long time now. While at its current state, it does not lend to a lot of portability, but some great custom enclosures are being put together. Also, the price is far less restrictive than the Villagetronic solution.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/418851-diy-egpu-experiences.html#post5324240
I have gone as far as getting rid of my desktop since my docked HP Elitebook 8460p with second-gen i7-2720qm with 8gb ram and GTX460 is faster at just about everything than my old Intel Q9300/GTX 460 system. The only downside RIGHT NOW is there are no PCIe 2.0 compliant parts yet, so we are seeing limited bandwidth. Even Villagetronics parts are having trouble working on 2.0 compliant laptop(Lenovo x220)
My experiences
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/418851-diy-egpu-experiences-464.html#post7750576
Once 2.0 compliant parts are available, I am switching to a GTX570 for gaming on the internal LCD at friends, and my 24" LCD at home.
Unfortunately, my Elitebook has no TB port or I would perhaps go that route simply for a cleaner, less work intensive solution.
You are so wrong about that it made me laugh. Next time you pick on someone's reading comprehension, make sure you aren't the one fucking up.
Except that you already have PCIe bus on a cable (external PCIe x8 adapters already exist, and more will appear until the end of the year).
The problem (that is oh-so-common in the anti-Apple crowd) is that the world doesn't revolve around PC gaming. Many need to get past the belief that the only thing people care about is how many frames per second they can get in a game - and how small that part of the market really is.
This isn't about games, it's about getting real work done. And that is something that an external Thunderbolt GPU would be good for - when you're at the office, you plug in the GPU, and do your video editing and encoding using the external GPUs - and have additional monitors to help with video editing. You can use OpenCL to do compute-intensive work. For those that are ignorant: Apple makes heavy use of GPU acceleration, in everything from graphics editing and display to h.264 encoding. If they can use the GPU to accelerate it, they do. My graphics editor of choice uses Apple's GPU-accelrated API's to do just about everything with the images; filters run in real-time, rather than having to apply & undo while tweaking settings.
And most importantly: Thunderbolt isn't specific to notebooks. It allows professionals to plug in (and chain) multiple Thunderbolt devices into anything that has the port - be it a high end desktop that already has four GPU's churning away, to a notebook that has one. It allows for the user to scale the number of GPU resources in the same way we already scale storage with external drives.
The fact you could use it for games is a bit of a red herring - you could also use it to keep your drink warm.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
PCIE specifications prior to PCIE 3.0 use 8b/10b encoding. 10Gbps of PCIE bandwidth is only 8Gbps of data. You do not "get a full 10Gb/sec". USB 3.0 also uses 8b/10b, though, so this is still twice as fast.
You can get a USB->Amiga 1200 clockport bridge too.
The clock port is a little 22 pin header on Amiga 1200s (low end Amiga 'keyboard computer') that allow a realtime clock to be installed inexpensively.
Third party manufacturers have made USB controllers for it... amongst other things. You definitely can bridge transports with enough will! Even ones with 4 address lines and 8 data lines hooked up to D16 through D23 of a 32-bit data bus.
Actually, I think that USB 3.0 is a technology in search of a solution. The only thing USB 3.0 does better than 2.0 is move large quantities of data. This pretty much means that its utility is limited to storage devices such as hard drives, SSDs, etc. (Printers are already served much better by Ethernet, IMO, and most other devices don't need that much bandwidth.)
For storage purposes, eSATA utterly spanks USB 3.0 because of the lower protocol overhead, and is cheaper because of the lower silicon requirements. Further, with the (unofficial standard) combination eSATAp ports, USB 3.0 provides no real benefit over eSATA.
As far as I can tell, by the time USB 3.0 finally made it into silicon, the only reason for USB 3.0 to even exist is to push manufacturers to build enough power handling into their USB ports to make eSATAp possible. I don't expect a USB 4.0. Ever. By contrast, eSATA will continue to get faster.
If everything is perfectly optimal, USB 3.0 is half as fast as a single Thunderbolt channel. On most Macs, each cable has two channels, for a total of four times as fast. So no, it's nowhere near as fast.
The reason for Thunderbolt is actually pretty obvious if you look at Apple's history. Apple has consistently looked for ways to allow a single cable to connect from your monitor to your computer and still provide USB and FireWire ports on top of your desk. Prior to Thunderbolt, this required either an Apple-proprietary video cable (the ADC connector) or running a bundle of wires that broke out into multiple connectors near the computer end. With Thunderbolt, they can do the same thing with a single, industry-standard cable. And have. It has FireWire 800, Gig-E, and USB (2.0—Apple hasn't gotten on the USB 3.0 bandwagon) ports.
If I were placing bets on what ports Apple will lose by 2014, my money would be on pretty much all the other ports. With Thunderbolt, Apple could provide a single USB port, a headphone jack, and a single Thunderbolt port, and it would take care of everyone's needs. Apple or a third party could provide FireWire, Ethernet, and USB breakout dongles for the few people who really need those other ports in the field, and Apple could sell its existing monitors for the 99% of people who only need them while tethered to a desk.
Given how much more flexibility Thunderbolt gives Apple, someone would have to be crazy not to take you up on your 2014 bet if you weren't posting as an A.C. Even if no one but Apple adopted Thunderbolt, and even if no non-Apple Thunderbolt peripherals made it to market, it would already be as successful as necessary to all but guarantee long-term relevance.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Intel says the PCIe part of Thunderbolt is 10gbits/sec which would make it 2x PCIe 2.0. PCIe 2.0 is 500MB/sec per lane, using 8b/10b encoding so 5gbits/sec raw data rate.
It has a 4x connection to the chipset, but that doesn't mean it has 4x worth of bandwidth out.
2x is going to hamstring high end graphics cards some.
I'm not saying it is unworkable, but there are limits to the performance you'll get because of the interface, particularly considering graphics cards are only going to use more and more bandwidth, as time goes on.
I was exhausted last night. I meant to say that it's incredibly bridgable not protocol agnostic.
But my point stands, it's meant to compete with ExpressCard, which also is another means of breaking out PCIe lanes. Thunderbolt is not meant to compete with USB.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Well developed by Intel is probably more of a deciding factor. Sony and Apple are the first to implement it. Apple seems to be incorporating it in all their computers going forward. Sony's adoption isn't as widespread yet.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Thunderbolt is not competing against USB either.
Right now if you want something better than firewire 800 or gig-e (which afaict is comparable to a single modern desktop hard drive on sequential transfers so will bottleneck an external raid array or SSD) and have a mac (other than the mac pro) you have no choice but to use thunderbolt. If you have a PC you can't use thunderbolt. So right now thunderbolt isn't in direct competition with any other interface.
But if and when thunderbolt crosses over into the PC world it will have to compete with USB3 and eSATA. It's better than them but I have my doubts as to whether it's better by a wide enough margin to displace them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well if you read the first link you used, external PCIe has power limitations of 20W so some video cards today will use up all the power. Also for the most part, it's been found that the PCIe x 20 has been overkill for most applications. TB will satisfy the majority of users; hardcore gamers will not use it but they won't use external PCIe either because of the limitations.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Why not? That's still as fast as many first-generation PCIe boards were when you used two video cards. (They had two physical PCIe 1.0 16x slots, that would switch to two PCIe 1.0 8x slots electrically when you filled them both. PCIe 2.0 is twice as fast, so a PCIe 2.0 4x connection is as fast as the PCIe 1.0 8x slot.
Plus many gaming benchmarks have shown that even using a 4x slot instead of a 16x slot doesn't slow down significantly.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Let's see. Grandparent talks about problems with technology solving a non-existent problem. Parent claims that we will need things like thunderbolt because we won't have any slots in a desktop - we'll just have everything hooked up on one type wonderful cable, so you end up having one hell of a mess of devices hooked up to main board with one type of super fast cable.
I note that progress has been heading in the EXACT OPPOSITE DIRECTION, and use laptops as example of a system that handles everything through slotting rather then cabling. Child post rages that I'm wrong, and claims that users do in fact want small PCs like popular modern laptops... which have no cables in them, only slots.
Ouch?
Then again, your post history said more about you then anything else. Keep on trolling young padawan.
and any video card case will have it's own PSU in it.
And an external Thunderbolt box won't? That seems to be a crux of your argument that Thunderbolt doesn't have the necessary power but when it's pointed out that external PCIe may not either you switch the argument that it might have external power.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
because a Thunderbolt port "wraps" raw DisplayPort and PCI Express 4x connections. USB is no where NEAR close to doing that. For instance a company can build a little box with a PCIe 4x slot in it and let you attach WHATEVER you want... graphics, Nic, USB, Firewire controllers all the standard versions. It also has the ability to encapsulate protocols as well like... Much like Fiber Chanel can wrapper for IP... That makes it VERY powerful. USB is just for slave devices and ALL the bandwidth has to be managed by the drivers on the CPU.. no HARDWARE shortcuts. That's always been the Difference between Firewire and USB to begin with. USB is ultimately a "hub" technology, much like the old ethernet hubs. Firewire is like a switch, maybe even a managed switch, because ENDS can manage too. when you only have 2-3 devices a network hub works fine, with less overhead. When you need to actually share all 3, under load, hubs break down... that's the same result you see in the USB vs Firewire. And Thunderbolt is 10x what those are.
As far a "loss" in an external connection, Intel has had Infiniband and similar tech for a VERY long time.. that literally bundled up the entire PCI bus (literally the raw hardware lines) to an external enclosure about 6 feet or so long. They've been doing external PCI enclosures on SERVERS for decades. The cable doesn't have to be 1-inch thick anymore!
You're missing that USB is divided into Hosts and Slaves. The port on your PHONE is backed by the same Host services chip that your desktop "master" USB port is. That is why USB has a clear distinction between ends A & B and no cable is supposed to have both A or both B. Very few phones have USB OUT on them. Because the design of the spec was to allow very CHEAP devices but handicap the device's ability to negotiate between themselves on their own.. so no "official" USB-to-USB cords.
Aside from the fact that you seem to have missed the development of USB OTG, I have no idea what this had to do with my post.
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