Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen Thunderbolt: Twice as Fast, But a Different Connector
Details have leaked about the next iteration of Intel's Thunderbolt connector. The good news: bandwidth will double, going up to about 40Gbps from its current 20. Power usage will drop by half, and it'll support PCI-e 3.0. The bad news: it uses a redesigned connector, and will rely on adapters for backward compatibility. From the article:
"Doubling the available bandwidth will enable next-generation Thunderbolt controllers to drive two 4K displays simultaneously, where current controllers can only drive one. The new controllers will allegedly be compatible with a variety of other protocols as well, including DisplayPort 1.2, USB 3.0, and HDMI 2.0. Intel will offer two different versions of the controller—a version that uses four PCI Express lanes to drive two Thunderbolt ports and an "LP" (presumably "Low Power") version that uses two PCI Express lanes to drive one port."
The 10 people affected by this bus imrovement went out to celebrate but were hit by a car going twice the speed limit.. Oh the humanity!
Seriously though, I like to consider my needs a non-professional leading on the bleeding edge (2x 2560x1440's) But I don't even own a thunderbolt port, and unless some amazing peripherals come along to change my use case, I don't see that changing soon.
All I want is:
1. standard bus standard which can drive anything
2. said connector/cabling comes in 3 sizes from really really tiny cell phone variety to honking large clicking in connector that can't break
3. That is future expandible to whatever for the next 10 years minimum
4. No IP which prevents competition in said space except for standards bodies who's potfolios are both fair and unbiased in licensing terms
Addendum I. Monster cables is specifically banned from ever producing said cables for ever
Nice to have's
5. Fibre option
6. Broadcast based networking support
7. Bus QOS control
8. Standard descriptive naming (NO BS marketing names like super-speed, hyper-active speed, high definition bandwidth, etc. )
9. Support host wake/power-on
10. Support at least bi-directional communications so I can plug in Bluetooth/IR/Wifi/etc.. message receivers and have if not chipset, at least OS support for pluggable and routable support for input methods without BS proprietary support all over the place
Bye!
Why is it everything apple embraces early ends up being a constantly changing connector
Because they can sell new ones at 60$ a piece and pocket the 55+$ in profit every year or so, putting in code that tells if it is "genuine Apple" or not?
Is Intel *TRYING* to kill off Thunderbolt? They can't make up their mind if they want USB 3.X or Thunderbolt to be their next-gen connection, and now (despite extremely low Thunderbolt adoption), they're going to change the connector?
USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt are redundant. At this point, they even both support uncompressed video. Pick one, drop (or deprecate) support for the other, and the industry will migrate.
At least it sounds like they have an actual reason this time. They didn't used to bother explaining it. It was just
Apple: Here's your new phone, and you'll want to buy a new cord too.
Customer: Oh no thanks, I have the old one.
Apple: That one won't work anymore, the new one is $40!
Customer: Wait, why won't it work? It's exactly the same.
Apple: It's incompatible with the new phone.
Customer: It IS compatible! See, I can plug it in!.. and it's telling me it's not compatible?
Apple: Yes, because it's incompatible.
Customer: Why is it incompatible!?! It fits and carries electricity still!
Apple: Because when you plug it in, the phone tells you it's incompatible and stops itself from charging... duh...
Customer: This seems like you artificially made the phone incompatible with old cords just to nickle and dime me for new accessories!
Apple: No sir, it costs forty dollars, not fifteen cents.
Plus, the idea of defining a "cabling" for the consumer market where every cable is on its own with regards to how it implements the physical layer is a very bad idea. It renders cables terribly expensive and you cannot be sure that the cable from vendor A will work well with the socket from vendor B.
The thing is USB doesn't have DMA. This is on purpose, it allows for cheaper devices and is more secure. However it means everything has to go through the CPU. So higher load, higher latency. Thunderbolt is just PCIe (and display) so it is as low latency and impact as a card in the system.
For lots of usages, the difference doesn't matter, but for heavy hitting stuff it can.
> I'm not sure there's anything that USB does that Thunderbolt can't do
Thunderbolt does PCIe and USB, so there is nothing USB can do that Thunderbolt can't. If there were, Thunderbolt would do it via USB.
Thunderbolt is basically PCIe + USB + HDMI + power, all on the same cable.
A single mode fiber allows for Tbps, over significantly longer distances than any electrical high speed communication, and fits into a connector as tiny as you can make them. Add two copper wires for power and then leave it alone for at least a decade.
I think you just explained why this hasn't been done.
The funny thing is that all of those were objectively better in performance than what PCs were using, with the (possible) exception of USB. Apple never went for the cheap option just for the sake of being cheap, but the rest of the industry never followed whole-heartedly, so Apple ended up with tech that died, except for niches.
USB is the one that Apple dove into and somehow (probably because of the promise of cheap peripherals) got PC makers to go along. The charge was led by Apple.
You should explain all that to the people who wrote the VESA standard, because they think they used 4 lanes of PCIe-capable pairs AND a lower bandwidth aux channel on pin 15 and pin 17 that can speak USB. The display part of Thunderbolt is DisplayPort. DisplayPort has always had the USB channel. Technically, that channel COULD be used for something other than USB, but on all implementations I've ever seen it's broken out into USB plug.
VESA publishes a very nice document called "Overview of DisplayPort" that explains it pretty well in just 40 pages. It's a good thing to read if you want to have some understanding of the protocol. It's suggested that you know something about it before arguing about it.
1) Power and data do not belong on the same connector or cable.
Bullshit they don't. Power and data should be on the same cable unless there is a compelling technical reason for them not to be. A big part of the appeal of USB is specifically because it can carry both data and power over the same cable. Why on earth would I want a separate power connector if I don't have to have one?
2) Extra pins cost more up front, but make backward compatibility less of a pain down the road.
Extra pins are not usually the problem when it comes to making a serial connection faster. Your point is valid but universally so.
Even as shitty and useless as it started out, USB has put all of these to shame.
USB carries both power and data on the same cable and recent versions have more pins than the original. Want to try that argument again when you have set your double standards for Apple vs everyone else aside?
No they are not. They overlap in functionality but they are not the same.
Same argument was made for USB vs Firewire and we know how that turned out. Firewire was objectively better in a lot of ways but USB won because it was cheaper and good enough. Nobody except Apple supports Thunderbolt really so even if USB 3/3.1 is flawed I think it is going to win that standards battle.
Yes it does support uncompressed video but how well it does so far does not seem as though it is as good as TB.
Doesn't have to be "as good as" it just needs to be good enough. USB is a great example of a "good enough" technology. It's not perfect but it generally gets the job done and everyone has it.
For most consumers, USB 3.1 will be fine for most applications. For professionals, they are likely to get TB devices for their needs.
In the short run you are probably correct. In the long run I think Thunderbolt is likely to be a niche standard like Firewire.
The charge was led by Apple.
No, it wasn't. Apple wasn't part of the group that developed USB, and tried hard not to support it for a long time. I have a 3rd gen iPod that can't even transfer files over USB, you must use Firewire.
What really made USB popular was when USB 2.0 hit, and again Apple had nothing to do with it. PC manufacturers started adding more USB ports and it became easier to attach a number of devices. Who would attach a keyboard and mouse when their machine only had two USB ports? HP in particular was one of the companies that helped develop USB 2.0, and they started moving to USB keyboards and mice as standard around then too.
Apple's biggest contribution was getting rid of the floppy drive in preference of Firewire/USB drives. They themselves tried to push Firewire for drives though, refusing to add USB compatibility to their storage peripherals until iPod compatibility with PCs forced them to. That was around 2003/4 IIRC, very late to the game.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What really made USB popular was when USB 2.0 hit, and again Apple had nothing to do with it. PC manufacturers started adding more USB ports and it became easier to attach a number of devices. Who would attach a keyboard and mouse when their machine only had two USB ports? HP in particular was one of the companies that helped develop USB 2.0, and they started moving to USB keyboards and mice as standard around then too.
What really made USB popular was that it was cheap shit. There was practically no licensing cost on the interface, and all you needed was a few pennies worth of host-driven IO. When it makes no difference to your bottom line, of course you put a dozen of the fuckers on a machine. Your mouse and keyboard really need no significant performance, so who cares if it's on a slow, CPU-hungry interface, and even things like (consumer grade) scanners and printers benefit more from a small, hot-attachable plug than they do from a hardware driven interface.
When you start trying to use it for storage, or cameras, or network interfaces, or monitors, or anything with any real data rate, now the cheap shittiness of the interface of the interface rears its ugly head, but it's too late, because it's already the pervasive peripheral interconnect. This is why Apple was trying to hold out with Firewire over USB
Yet every single device in my house (by half a dozen different manufacturers), with the sole exception of those made by Apple, uses a single USB plug to connect and charge. Explain that.
Way to ignore the context of the conversation. Are you autistic, by chance?