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Can Thunderbolt Survive USB SuperSpeed+?
Lucas123 writes: "The USB SuperSpeed+ spec (a.k.a. v3.1) offers up to 10Gbps throughput. Combine that with USB's new C-Type Connector, the specification for which is expected out in July, and users will have a symmetrical cable and plug just like Thunderbolt but that will enable up to 100 watts of power depending on the cable version. So where does that leave Thunderbolt, Intel's other hardware interconnect? According to some analysts, Thunderbolt withers or remains a niche technology supported almost exclusively by Apple. Even as Thunderbolt 2 offers twice the throughput (on paper) as USB 3.1, or up to 20Gbps, USB SuperSpeed+ is expected to scale past 40Gbps in coming years. 'USB's installed base is in the billions. Thunderbolt's biggest problem is a relatively small installed base, in the tens of millions. Adding a higher data throughput, and a more expensive option, is unlikely to change that,' said Brian O'Rourke, a principal analyst covering wired interfaces at IHS."
I figured that all along. It took off on Apple hardware, with almost no pickup on normal PCs. That has finally started to happen a little - some upper end motherboards have 1 or 2 Thunderbolt ports now, and Asus has an add-on board for a few others - but it is really a niche thanks to its odd hardware requirements and lack of early adoption outside of Apple. USB is easier to use, and at least up to 3.0 has been backward compatible with older devices. With an even faster option, as long as they don't screw something up, I don't see how USB could not continue to be the leading connectivity standard.
William George
Thunderbolt isn't going to replace USB in all cases, but Thunderbolt isn't about the speed. It's about the protocol. Thunderbolt is basically PCI-E over a wire. Can you connect a GTX 780 Ti (http://techreport.com/news/26426/thunderbolt-box-mates-macbook-pro-with-geforce-gtx-780-ti) with USB 3.1? No? Not really a replacement then. Same goes for any other device that has traditionally been a PCI-E card. Or, you know, you can get an adaptor (http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpressiii.html) and directly connect a PCI-E card.
Speed wise Thunderbolt is evolving too. At this rate there isn't much of a chance of USB 3.1 catching Thunderbolt. As the OP mentioned, Thunderbolt is still ahead of USB 3.1 and 40 Gbps Thunderbolt is coming soon (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/181099-next-gen-thunderbolt-details-40gbps-pcie-3-0-hdmi-2-0-and-100w-power-delivery-for-single-cable-pcs). But again, even is USB catches Thunderbolt, or both become fast enough, the protocols and designs of the connections makes them entirely unsuitable for each other's uses (you wouldn't connect a mouse and keyboard to your PCI-E bus directly via Thunderbolt.)
I have a really hard time caring about "up to 100 watts of power depending on the cable version", mostly because of the "depending on the cable version" part of the statement.
How is this different from DVI, which much or might not have multichannel audio, might or might not be analog, might or might not support 5 channel digital sound, etc., etc.?
One thing Thunderbolt has going for it is that a cable is a cable, and you don't have to worry about it. If you want negotiated power supplied over USB, fine, but don't make me search my cardboard box for the "most sincere USB 3.1 cable". Thanks.
The problem with all USB to this point is the fact that it has been largely CPU bound. PCIe, Thunderbolt, SCSI, FireWire are DMA devices, not without it's risks but with proper management the performance is leaps and bounds above USB - sure it costs a little extra but that point quickly becomes moot when you see the benefits.
USB is fine for mice and keyboards and some other low-bandwidth and very cheap things. FireWire has been doing low-latency audio and video (high-res) since it's inception. Even full-speed USB2 on a modern computer has difficulties getting a VGA frame buffer to work properly while studios have been able to live-edit multiple streams using FireWire since the PowerMac G5.
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Thunderbolt 2 allows me to connect a 4k DisplayPort screen (or daisy chain two lower resolution DisplayPort monitors). Its connector is the same as mini-DisplayPort. It's small and convenient. Apple fit two TB 2 buses next to each other on my 13" MacBook Pro. Nice. Very high bandwidth, PCIe.
I don't want to plug a keyboard into this bus, because its overkill. Thunderbolt will probably never have any cost effective way to do a hub/star type topography. For general use lower bandwidth (haha, 1 gigabit is low bandwidth now!) peripherals I need USB. And my MacBook has that too. I wouldn't want it any other way.
That said, USB 3.0 seems like a ball of hurt compared to the difference between USB 1.0/1.1/2.0
Just look at the ads for USB 3 hubs. Most of them state which chipset revision they use, so you can look up whether or not your motherboard / OS will have difficulty with them. I built a FreeBSD 9.1 file server using usb 3 / usb 3 docks, but I failed them all back down to using their 2.0 interface due to persistent flakiness/dropping off the bus type issues. Rock solid on USB 2.0. YMMV, but I hope that USB 3 gets over its growing pains soon.
USB 3.0 added DMA and async (no-polling) control. CPU usage should be on par with FireWire.
USB is the "mainstream, use for anything" connector. USB SS+ with type-C and 100 W power delivery makes it even moreso.
Thunderbolt is external PCI Express. Over long distances with optical cabling. Yes, there are few places in which TB is better than USB SS+, but in those places, USB SS+ can't compete - at all.
Need a 20 Gb/s connection to your storage array in the next room over? USB SS+ can't do that. Need an effectively-zero-latency connection to an external sound/video editing rig? Yeah, PCIe is your format, over Thunderbolt.
And don't expect Thunderbolt to sit still, either. While USB has plans to increase speed, so does TB. TB has PCIe3 coming up, and other improvements.
No, I never expect Thunderbolt to become even as mainstream as FireWire was, but it most certainly won't just go away, either.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Amen to the "Ball of hurt".
I design USB3 H/W....what. a. piece. of. shit. I have truly given up hope of engineering anything that will ever work universally, even Intels interfaces which you would like to believe would be a model reference design look like crap when you plug them into a gizillion dollar Agilent USB3 analyzer. Should I be be surprised? Probably not, USB has never exactly been the premium interface has it? Firewire didn't go away because USB was technically superior thats for sure. Thunderbolt just friggin' works, day in, day out, incredible and reliable performance. Sure cables are expensive, they have all sorts of clever active electronics...because...thats what it takes to make 10G in a consumer application work...not a $1.99 piece of injection molded crap from god knows what Asian hell chemical works. In fact Thunderbolts worst problem is ....Intel.....who seem to have a bizarre attitude towards people who want to buy components from them to make peripherals...I honestly don't get it.
That we keep talking about the two in language that exactly describes the two, but we completely ignore the language?
EVERY spec for USB refers to the "up to" speed and quotes the maximum theoretical burst transfer rate that is sustainable for only fractions of a second in host to single peer communication.
Thunderbolt's speed is the speed. period. 1 peer or 16 peers doesn't matter. You get 20Gb/s every second after every second. USB has never and is likely to never achieve that.
This was true of Firewire vs USB as well; USB claimed "up to 480Mb/s" but could never sustain that for any human sense-able time. Firewire 800 was flatly 400Mb/s. Firewire didn't advertise a theoretical maximum speed that you could get once in a while; it was a real-world measurable throughput when you were copying files.
So as long as people are ignorant enough to fall for marketing hype instead of actual useful data then USB will continue to dominate (and people will continue to purchase cars based solely on HP ratings)
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There is one thing Thunderbolt does have going for it, however.
Since it's essentially a PCI bus extension --- this means, you can add an external PCI chassis attached via Thunderbolt without needing special drivers, and in theory.... you can do things like add additional GPUs and arbitrary PCI devices to your desktop way beyond the expandability of your physical motherboard's or primary chassis' form factor.
There's really no way to accomplish something like that using USB, at least.... not with complicated specialized drivers being developed
In the future, we will ship something WAY better than what Apple is shipping now, so obviously what Apple is shipping now is worthless.
You're confusing usefulness with relevance. Thunderbolt is, and will reman, irrelevant to PCs, largely because PCs have plenty of internal expansion capability and sufficient USB ports, Display Ports, HDMI ports, etc.
I figured that all along. It took off on Apple hardware, with almost no pickup on normal PCs. That has finally started to happen a little - some upper end motherboards have 1 or 2 Thunderbolt ports now, and Asus has an add-on board for a few others - but it is really a niche thanks to its odd hardware requirements and lack of early adoption outside of Apple. USB is easier to use, and at least up to 3.0 has been backward compatible with older devices. With an even faster option, as long as they don't screw something up, I don't see how USB could not continue to be the leading connectivity standard.
Try hooking an external SSD up to you machine via USB3 and then via Thunderbolt and you'll see why Thunderbolt is desirable if you are transferring large amounts of data: http://gizmodo.com/5980157/thu.... Take a look at the "Time to write 16.9 Gb of data" row in the table at the bottom and imagine you are transferring 3,4 or 500 Gb. There is about 250 Gb of data on the SSD in my MacBook Pro, large amounts of that data can change frequently meaning long backup times and cutting the time it takes to write that stuff up to disk in half is a major bonus. The problem Thunderbolt has had is not just backwards compatibility, i..e. that here are so many USB 3 devices out there that it is going to take a looooong while to put a dent in the USB monoculture (as you correctly pointed out). Thunderbolt devices have also had a tendency to be more expensive which didn't help either nor did the fact that up until now you have only started to benefit from Thunderbolt for real when using SSDs and they are also expensive which just aggravates the cost problem. When the USB 3 alternative is 2-3 times less expensive than Thunderbolt the choice for the consumer is obvious. If there is going to be a USB standard that is comparable in speed to Thunderbolt, backwards compatible with all the old USB2 and USB3 devices and that has a better connector, Thunderbolt is doomed. Intel should have pushed Thunderbolt way more aggressively i.e. handed out Thunderbolt product licenses liberally, provide motherboard and peripheral manufacturers with incentives or even sell Thunderbolt chips at cost.
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Correlation is not causation. What really made USB popular was when 2.0 came out, which was developed mostly by Intel and HP. At that point you could connect hard drives and get reasonable speeds, and hardware costs for slow devices like keyboards dropped too as HP found a way to do the timing required for USB 1.1 cheaply.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Heck, wasn't the iSight the only webcam for Firewire? "
Nope, not even close. Not only were there dedicated FireWire based webcams, but almost every digital video camera had FireWire (and could be used as a webcam) until they went from tape to flash/HD.
People who see FireWire as some kind of failure must have been completely absent in the digital video industry for almost a decade.
I take it you don't do video?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You're confusing usefulness with relevance. Thunderbolt is, and will reman, irrelevant to PCs, largely because PCs have plenty of internal expansion capability and sufficient USB ports, Display Ports, HDMI ports, etc.
Not often I wish for mod points and don't have them, but this pretty much nails it.
Thunderbolt is solid technology - basically PCIe on a cable - but its relevance to machines that don't need PCIe on a cable (or provide an equivalent - ie: a docking station) is close to nil.
The use case for Thunderbolt on Macs, due to their typical design focusing on form factor over other factors, is reasonable.
The use case outside of Macs, is niche (to say the least).
I see a lot of concern here about backwards compatibility with any new interface. Why are we really concerned about this?
Your brand new server with quad-port Gig-E interfaces still auto-negotiates down to 10Mb speeds. Why? Because you might hook up your new $10,000 server to a $20 network hub you bought off eBay? Uh...no.
Apple had literally billions of devices in the market with the old sync connector. Then, they came out with an all-new connector, alienating entire lines worth of products. Did they go bankrupt? Was there some massive revolt in the industry? No, not quite.
My point is we should learn to move on. Stop worrying about backwards compatibility to ensure that we address scenarios that rarely happen, if ever. What exactly was Thunderbolt compatible with when it came out? Or Firewire? Didn't stop them from innovating.
Besides, there's a damn good chance that every single piece of computing hardware in your hands today will be replaced within 3-5 years, so I fail to see why we care even from a logistical standpoint. You won't even have the hardware in your hands to worry about backwards compatibility, and vendors will always see replacement as THE solution, so don't expect many long-term favors from them either.
That sounds amazing! You're saying that USB 3.1 means I won't be able to suck out the entire contents of your RAM like I can with a Firewire or Thunderbolt dongle?
What would really be amazing would be if instead of snark, your comment contained some sort of awareness of the existence of an IOMMU, which prevents this sort of attack on modern hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"