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Intel Drops Thunderbolt 3 Royalty, Adds CPU Integration and Works Closely With Microsoft (windowscentral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Over the last few days, Thunderbolt 3 has been a hot topic amongst Windows users especially with its notable absence with the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. Part of the problem is adoption, integration, cost, and consumer confusion according to Microsoft. Intel is aware of the current roadblocks to Thunderbolt 3 implementation, which adds 40Gbps data transfers along with charging and display support for USB Type-C. Today, the company announced numerous changes to its roadmap to speed up its adoption, including: Dropping royalty fees for the Thunderbolt protocol specification starting next year; Integrating Thunderbolt 3 into future Intel CPUs. The good news here is that Intel is dropping many of the roadblocks with today's announcement. By subtracting the licensing costs for Thunderbolt 3 and integrating into the CPU, Intel can finally push mass adoption. Getting back to Microsoft, Intel noted that the two companies are already working closely together with the latest Creators Update bringing more OS support for the protocol. Roanne Sones, general manager, Strategy, and Ecosystem for Windows and Devices at Microsoft added that such cooperation would continue with even more OS-level integration coming down the road.
Maybe we'll see an alternative implementation from AMD.
Who else is Intel "working closely" with?
So the question for someone looking to buy a revised MacBook Pro this year would be, buy it now for a battle-tested Thunderbolt 3 connection, or wait for the chip integration for performance gains even though it will be a fist gen thing next year...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Finally!, now hopefully a simple box consisting of a PCIE -> TB3 interface and a cheapo PSU will cost less than $299.
So now instead of a premium product thunderbolt is free and integrated.... as long as you are using an intel cpu. Of course AMD won't be able to add it to their CPUs. So the pending Ryzen mobiles will either have to do without or pay for the space, power, and expense of a discrete chip.
We Linux users LOVE it (sarcasm) when chip companies like Intel-everyone become best buds with Micro$hit. Thank god for Windblow$ 10 for allowing "GNU/NT" (Linux emulator) on its system, because you know, it's the same thing as actual Linux -_-. If we can crack Chrimebooks (Get it? No desktop, so no privacy), I'm sure we can crack this too.
Will thunderbolt-3 be on my AMD chips?
Just another step towards locking out any OS but Windows 10, including locking out older versions of Windows. Either that, or badly cripple the few OS's that do still run on it, likely requiring approval by MS in order to get their boot loader signed for UEFI Secure Boot.
And right while people are finding out that even Enterprise edition Windows 10 refuses to stop talking to external servers (including ad servers), even though companies pay through the nose for this specific version of Windows so that they can prevent just that sort of thing.
Make no mistake about it. Microsoft wants to own your computer, and intends on leaving you no choice in the matter, except perhaps not to own a computer at all. We're going to be seeing a lot worse coming down the pike very shortly at this rate.
Have a look at a Gigabyte Aero 15. It is about half a pound heavier than a MBP but still pretty light n' thin, and with that you get a GTX 1060. This generation of nVidia mobile cards almost exactly match their desktop counterparts specs wise, so that's a lot of dGPU power.
Nobody wants cables to be expensive - cables are expendable goods, prone to mechanical wear out, and you need to have a lot of them to be prepared for many situations, some of which might never occur.
A connector standard that requires expensive active electronics as an integral part of any cable is sure to fail with regards to mass market penetration.
I've seen plenty of wars over which standard comes to dominate. Beta-VHS, MS-keyboard vs USB (initially), SCSI vs. RS-232 (as a philosophical choice of parallel vs serial). But I don't understand this one.
Why competition between Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C? Aren't they nominally identical in all respects? Or are they exactly identical (?), in which case I am exposing my ignorance.
Is this still architected so that anybody who can stick a cable in the side of your computer can suck down its memory contents?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Screw Microsoft in the ass. Why are they not working closely with Redhat and the Linux Kernel Developers?
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
how many buses and will severs be stuck with lowend video on die to drive this?
cell phone and desktop they need to dump roms then / make it so that your phone carrier can't per load and lock in crap + slow down updates.
This is not good news. It's a DMA-capable port, or worse: equivalent to a PCIe port. There is no way to secure such a port. Some have suggested IOMMU, but it's inadequare. ThunderStrike and ThunderStrike 2 already demonstrated trivial persistent implants over this port. It means if your laptop is out of your control even briefly, the screen lock can be bypassed, the unwrapped disk encryption key stolen, and persistent BIOS or AMT malware implanted. The multi-use of the port is even worse because it means your laptop doesn't even have to be out of your control. When Thunderbolt was a separate port, it was rarely used, or used through an adapter you control locking it to a more limited interface like displayport, limiting the frequency of your exposure. Now any charging brick will have physical RAM access and ability to implant backdoors.
With this port, things like tamper-proof screws become meaningless, and everything you stick into your laptop becomes a serious threat so using a public charger becomes a ridiculous proposition when it shouldn't be.
This is a terrible port, continuing the theme of Intel's NSA-friendly or at least NSA-blitheringly-ignorant designs (hardware RNG, AMT rootkit, AMT over wifi).
Building Thunderbolt support into the CPU does not sound like a good thing to me.
I already have issues with computers that offload the Wifi to the CPU. It makes some tablets almost unusable as apps come to a screeching halt when the Wifi needs CPU attention. It also means that heavy CPU loads can bring wifi to its knees.
In the good old days, you could optimize for I/O-heavy loads vs CPU-heavy loads. More and more, they are becoming the same thing. Let's hope that Intel doesn't move SSD control into their CPUs. What's next? CPU-powered RAID?