I am pretty amazed myself at how far they’ve gotten the speed of serial interfaces up without having to go optical or switch to some exotic material like Silicon-Germanium and really wonder how...
I am pretty amazed myself at how far they’ve gotten the speed of serial interfaces up without having to go optical or switch to some exotic material like Silicon-Germanium and really wonder how long they can keep it up.
Well, considering PCIe is doing the same voodoo magic with their sixth and seventh version, and all of that with the same backwards compatibility, AND optical is a crazy idea they're just starting...
A lot of the reason to keep pushing it is that it allows more connectivity and modularity. While a 4090 might not fully saturate a 8x PCIe 5 in full, it might not have access to the full bandwidth...
A lot of the reason to keep pushing it is that it allows more connectivity and modularity. While a 4090 might not fully saturate a 8x PCIe 5 in full, it might not have access to the full bandwidth of the cable if the interface converting USB to PCIe is poor quality. The more overhead you've got the better you have a chance at achieving full performance. In addition to allowing more ubiquitous eGPU applications (great for the idea of having something like mini PCs and laptops keeping the main system separate from gaming to better saturate the needs of the consumer), it allows for cool ideas like usb hubs with an m.2 slot in the middle so your usb-c dock can now also be an external hard drive for backing up data. Additionally, having more throughput through a single port allows for hubs to be serving multiple things - one day we might be able to plug an eGPU, a raid nvme enclosure, and multiple displays to a single port, and that's a pretty neat idea.
Active Thunderbolt 5 cables will take longer to arrive because they require a USB redriver change. But Intel expects passive Thunderbolt 5 cables to be up to 6.56 feet (2 m) long.
I did not know USB4 only supports one monitor. That's a bit disappointing and probably a big selling point for people to keep buying thunderbolt over generic USB.
I did not know USB4 only supports one monitor. That's a bit disappointing and probably a big selling point for people to keep buying thunderbolt over generic USB.
I am pretty amazed myself at how far they’ve gotten the speed of serial interfaces up without having to go optical or switch to some exotic material like Silicon-Germanium and really wonder how long they can keep it up.
Well, considering PCIe is doing the same voodoo magic with their sixth and seventh version, and all of that with the same backwards compatibility, AND optical is a crazy idea they're just starting to think about, I'm sure thunderbolt (and USB) can push more data in the future. We just need to keep in mind that current hardware is the bottleneck, not the connection - even a 4090 doesn't saturate a 8x PCIe 5 in full. Datacenter applications are, of course, different, but for the majority of use cases, it's enough!
A lot of the reason to keep pushing it is that it allows more connectivity and modularity. While a 4090 might not fully saturate a 8x PCIe 5 in full, it might not have access to the full bandwidth of the cable if the interface converting USB to PCIe is poor quality. The more overhead you've got the better you have a chance at achieving full performance. In addition to allowing more ubiquitous eGPU applications (great for the idea of having something like mini PCs and laptops keeping the main system separate from gaming to better saturate the needs of the consumer), it allows for cool ideas like usb hubs with an m.2 slot in the middle so your usb-c dock can now also be an external hard drive for backing up data. Additionally, having more throughput through a single port allows for hubs to be serving multiple things - one day we might be able to plug an eGPU, a raid nvme enclosure, and multiple displays to a single port, and that's a pretty neat idea.
I guess the cables won't need to get shorter:
I did not know USB4 only supports one monitor. That's a bit disappointing and probably a big selling point for people to keep buying thunderbolt over generic USB.