Does anything even use thunderbolt 4’s bandwidth? About the only thing I’ve seen is external GPUs and even that is a ludicrously niche use case.
I’d be much more excited about a post about something using TB4 to its fullest. All I can think reading this title is “who cares?” Is someone going to make a reasonably priced and even remotely convenient 40gbps ethernet card for TB5? No. Do my NVME drives go past 40gbps? Generally not, but I could’ve seen use for fast drives plugged into tb4/5 at least. Is anyone using TB4/5 for datacenter interconnects where this speed would actually be useful? I doubt it.
Does anyone reading this post use tb4 on a daily basis and feel limited in any way?
Driving two 4k monitors at 10b120hz is pretty overkill to use thunderbolt for, is kind of my point. Is anyone actually being limited by that?
Even with cameras, the storage generally isn’t that fast. CFexpress cards cant generally break 2GB/s, and even 8+k cameras generally record to that or maybe USB-C (and if you’re recording to a USBC device you’re probably just gonna use USBC instead of thunderbolt).
NVMe that can do sustained write speeds like that will be full in a few minutes, unless you’re offloading to a massive high speed array over 10+gbit networking it just kind of seems like why bother?
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of going to faster interfaces for the sake of speed, but I have experienced almost zero real use of thunderbolt in real life, and I usually keep a pretty good eye out. My real question was mostly focused on whether there are people actually using thunderbolt and if they’re actually limited by 40gbps and I’m kinda just bitching at this point
Enterprise NVMe drives can do sustained writes of 7GB/s no problem. That’s 58Gbps plus overhead.
That’s to a single drive.
If you are a film crew connecting and ingesting multiple raw 8k 120hz video to be edited, this is very useful
As to whether they use USB4 v2 or thunderbolt, I’m not sure it matters. They look pretty similar, but with thunderbolt it’s very easy to know what the interface is capable of. Good luck when something says “USB 4”.
USB-C is just a connector - thunderbolt uses the exact same connector.
Apple really done want to just adopt the global standards of USB, do they xD
Anything they can do to feel special and squeeze more money out of their customers, forcing them to remain in a proprietary ecosystem and buy more stuff that only works with Apple products, etc
Can we just switch to fiber interfaces already? TB5 apparently has a one-meter maximum passive cable length, compared to TB4’s already short two meters.
Yes? Most use cases for Thunderbolt are external NVMe drives or laptop docks, those are fine with short cables.
The alternative of getting rid of USB-C plug compatibility and requiring an expensive optical assembly and fragile optical connectors would kill Thunderbolt. It means it’s gone from laptops where the space and cost is too high, it means it’s gone from iPads where it won’t even fit, external NVMe drives will settle for USB due to cost .
Active optical cables ARE part of the standard for those who need it.
Intel and Apple co-developed ThunderBolt, and the tech is free to use for all manufacturers, so why wouldn’t they? One more selling point on the spec sheet is always good.
If it was free to use then AMD would support it too. I didn’t realize Apple was involved with it too, I thought it was Intel’s IP. Weird for them to work together on that and then Apple gives Intel the finger like they did.
My guess is the cost of Thunderbolt compatible hardware, which explains why only premium devices (ie Macs) have TB ports. TB cables are also much more expensive than the average USB-C.
That being said: thunderbolt is still great for verification. If it says thunderbolt you exactly know what it can do and that it should work as expected. USB-4 will be plastered on anything that can do only plain usb4 speeds.
Can someone please explain how this is possible? What advancements on the tech tree did we have to make to double the bandwidth which we couldn’t previously?
From what I recall, the big change is in the signal encoding. It’s switching from PAM2 to 3, which will allow a lot more data to move down the line without having to totally rethink the cables and connectors. Although you will need new cables for this.
We made breakthroughs in recent yeara at harvesting alien technology from the crashed Roswell ships, leading to all of these “AI chips” and crazy speeds
stuff with this speeds existed already, it just wasn't via USB. it was expensive proprietary protocols and hardware and cables. USB is an open standard design for consumer use, and not for giant corps with datacenters who can pay $2,000 for a single data cable.
Thunderbolt is basically a data-transfer focused version of USB, and just requires a different controller that supports the new protocols to achieve the higher speeds.
multiplexing is one way to achieve higher bandwidth and throughput over the same physical cable.
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