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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?
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.
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.
No they are not. They overlap in functionality but they are not the same. If you want to transfer files sometimes from one medium to another, both can accomplish the task. However if you want low latency, low overhead data transfers (like real-time HD video edits on a NAS device), you want Thunderbolt. Also you can run USB, Ethernet, and video over TB and not the other way around. Even for all of their updates to the spec, USB 3.1 still has large overhead: "Though, some initial tests demonstrated usable transfer speeds of only 7.2 Gbit/s, leading to a 30% encoding overhead". Yes it does support uncompressed video but how well it does so far does not seem as though it is as good as TB.
For most consumers, USB 3.1 will be fine for most applications. For professionals, they are likely to get TB devices for their needs.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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 plugin 2 cables to dock my laptop. One power, one Thunderbolt.
The result is that when I plugin those two cables, my laptop suddenly sees 3 SSDs (the work at full speed), the Apple Thunderbolt monitor, 3 USB3 ports, external audio, and 2 additional monitors via display port, and a gigabit ethernet connection.
1 connection via thunderbolt hooks up literally 9 devices, and I've not used it yet but it also hooks up to a PCIe enclosure.
This allows my laptop to be pretty sparse on ports and light when I'm on the move, but full of devices when its sitting on my desk at home or the office.
And the thunderbolt connection blows the shitty USB protocol away, even for USB3 ... and I'm using TB1, not 2.
Thunderbolt is external PCIe. Don't knock it until you realize how useful it can be.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager