• Brandon@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • Turkey_Titty_city@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s the protocols more than anything.

      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.

      • clutch@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I heard about multiplexing in a radio frequency context, first time on digital… how would it work?

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • weedazz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

  • ZephyrXero@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    USB 4 can already do 80 gbit, why are they even bothering with a competing standard anymore?

  • MooseBoys@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • kalleboo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Thunderbolt optical cables exist if you need them, and for anyone who doesn’t the extra cost of the optical interface is a waste.

      • WaxedWookie@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 year ago

        Are you implying that needing a cable more than 1m long is an edge case rather than the norm that should be covered by the standard?

        • kalleboo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Need this cable at longer than 1m is an edge case. Longer lengths mean slower transfer speeds as copper has resistance which increases with length.

    • Dfy@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      But then you would need fiber glass cables, put it in your bag/pockets by itself and you have to buy another one

    • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You still need copper unless you don’t want to transmit power too.

      Interestingly, fiber technically has more latency than copper - light moves slower through fiber than electrons through copper.

  • Techmaster@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Why is Intel technology coming to Macs next year when Macs no longer use Intel chips? That makes no sense.

    • SimplePhysics@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Techmaster@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • __dev@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If it was free to use then AMD would support it too

          They do. There’s thunderbolt motherboards and it’s coming with USB-4 on the new 7000-series mobile chips.

        • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I believe I read rumors that Intel wants to be a US manufacturer of Apple Silicon chips someday down the road. Sharing the role with TSMC.

        • SimplePhysics@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • __dev@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Apple still uses intel chips in all their macs, just not for the CPU. The M1 Macbook for instances uses an Intel JHL8040R thunderbolt 4 chip.

  • stevestevesteve@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Storage and creative use cases, 100%. If you have several TBs coming off each camera per day, you will 100% feel the pain.

      Just driving two 4K monitors at 40Gbps is pretty much all of the bandwidth of TB3, assuming you’re doing 10b 120hz.

      A modern NVMe can easily do 50-60Gbps per drive.

      • stevestevesteve@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • Obinice@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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