Yeah. My guess is that much of the data swizzling to convert USB 3.1 to/from TB 3 is going to be done by the CPU to keep things cheap (at the expense of overall system performance). Again, my experience is more with Firewire when each device would have dedicated hardware which removed the need for bus management and data swizzling to be done by the CPU (but made devices more expensive). But it's likely the same story with TB.
And yeah, I agree that the lack of documentation is a bit frustrating (and leads to more speculation).
Wrong. Thunderbolt still requires a dedicated controller. The Alpine Ridge controller for TB3 just adds in USB 3.1 support. USB is the legacy protocol here.
Wrong. Thunderbolt still requires a dedicated controller. The Alpine Ridge controller for TB3 just adds in USB 3.1 support. USB is the legacy protocol here.
Right, so computers which support TB 3 will have dedicated hardware for adapting to USB 3.1 devices rather than relying on the CPU (as I figured). I was speculating about hooking up a TB 3 device to a USB 3.1 connector (and having compatibility in that direction, albeit with lower speed and power) if that's even possible. My guess is that, if it is possible, it would require the CPU to do the heavy lifting rather than having dedicated hardware to do so (like TB 3 devices would).
If they tried a little harder and ran things at 80Gbps or higher instead.You could have 8K video running at 60fps over one Thunderbolt cable. I suppose that may be offered in the future with Thunderbolt 4 or a further refinement of the USB spec...in the mean time you could achieve the same thing with two TB3 channels working via two active copper cables to an 8K monitor.
My mistake, you need a bandwidth of about 130Gbps to stream 8K video at 60fps so such a bandwidth is a long way off then and really not needed anytime soon...
60Hz refers to the display refresh rate. For example my iMac 5K has 60Hz refresh rate all the time, whether I'm watching a video or not.
60 fps refers to how fast a video was recorded. It can also refer to the capability of the computer to play back that video without dropping frames.
60Hz is sort of slow and 60 fps is sort of fast.
The original poster wrote 'supporting up to 8k video @ 60Hz' which lead me to believe that they meant 'video' as in a movie but perhaps they meant 8K resolution instead. Either way 60Hz at 8K would be pushing the envelope for sure.
Apple said that USB-C is the future. Tying it together with TB3 is very smart. Now, what am I going to do with all these different cables I have been collecting over the years. I even have old first generation USB with my going to be totally phased out firewire stuff. Is there a cable recycler out there?
A clever move by those behind Thunderbolt, making the USB versus Thunderbolt debate pointless.
It will be a good way of simultaneously maintaining physical compatibility and differentiating high end machines: low end computers will ship with the slower ports or even legacy USB 3.0 ports; high end machines will have the advantages and faster throughput of Thunderbolt 3 but still be able to use the slower peripherals.
Just how much of a hand did Apple have in creating Thunderbolt 3?
I'm not sure if it's entirely clever. Now the market will be filled with USB-C connectors, some supporting only USB and some supporting Thunderbolt. It will be a mess.
Apple said that USB-C is the future. Tying it together with TB3 is very smart. Now, what am I going to do with all these different cables I have been collecting over the years. I even have old first generation USB with my going to be totally phased out firewire stuff. Is there a cable recycler out there?
I still use a Firewire-400 external drive on my 2007 MacBook Pro. Works like a charm.
I still use a Firewire-400 external drive on my 2007 MacBook Pro. Works like a charm.
I have an older Sony consumer 1080 video camera that has FW 400 cable, compact to full size 6 pin. I had to buy a FW 400-female -> 800 male adapter plus a TB to FW adapter to use the camera with my new MBP. It cost nearly $50 in adapters to use old camera with a new computer. I guess the good thing is that they will continue to make adapters for all different situations.
True, but the real news here (not mentioned in the article) is that TB3 adds support for DisplayPort 1.3 (32.4 Gbit/s, supporting up to 8k video @ 60Hz, or 4k 3D @ 60Hz) and HDMI 2.0 (4k @ 60Hz, HDR video, hi-rez audio).
Thank you. It's like this article went out of its way to bury the important news.
Apple said that USB-C is the future. Tying it together with TB3 is very smart. Now, what am I going to do with all these different cables I have been collecting over the years. I even have old first generation USB with my going to be totally phased out firewire stuff. Is there a cable recycler out there?
During the keynote, Intel rolled out a giant ball to show how much cabling people have:
They said on average people have 6 cables each. The keynote was pretty neat relative to their past ones, lots of new tech coming. They showed off 360 degree 4K camera recording, no password logins using facial recognition, possibly using 3D scanning which was shown off too, their wireless charging, data and display, they mentioned external GPUs. They had the new Iris Pro GPUs, which Apple skipped this time.
Having a single port with the MB helps with a push towards wireless because if people don't have enough ports then they will be more inclined to use wireless for everything. If someone has a USB drive, an external display and a charger to all plug in at the same time, it's more likely that they will be coerced into adopting wireless charging + a WiGig drive and then just plug their display in or some other combination. With more ports, people just wouldn't change because it costs more and they have the cables. People have to be forced to avoid going the path of least resistance for their long-term benefit. Apple has always had to force change on people and they've always been met with resistance.
I expect the next Thunderbolt display can be a wireless display too. Intel WiDi supports 4K:
Even if it's a 5K display, you're not going to be able to tell 4K upscaled to it because it gets downscaled to a working resolution anyway. Someone could buy a 12" MB, a TB display, wireless SD cards, drives and some Rezence charging pad or an Apple solution (e.g a brick that can charge the laptop plus other devices just sitting near them) and the cables/ports won't be much of an issue at all. I don't think they can ever get rid of that last port because of diagnostics and raw performance.
Many people still use Firewire. I have a 2008 Macbook Pro and Mac Pro. Those machines still work very well. Some did not understand my statement earlier. The point I was trying to make is the new protocol USB-C embracing TB3 is going to cause a lot of simplified cabling and a pain for a lot of us with older tech. Sooner or later, your 2007 Macbook Pro and my computers will be obsolete. No more firewire ports or even display port. Apple is giving you a "heads up" with their plans with the introduction of the new Macbook with 1 USB-C port. I just bought some display port cables recently for my new LG monitor. Boy, do I feel stupid. With this new protocol, this transition to USB-C is going to be expensive... Just for new cables. I was hoping someone knew of a cable recycler so I can at least get a little bit of my money back for all these cables I have in my office. $1 a cable would be fine with me.
In a nut shell it will hardly be worthwhile to use an external TB connected GPU in the overwhelming majority of the cases.
This is such BS. The overwhelming majority of the cases is gaming and the difference is going to be about 15% between native PCIe x16 and over TB. Performance is still FAR better than the performance of even the new Intel IGPs.
"Real performance losses only become apparent in x8 1.1 and x4 2.0, where the performance drop becomes noticeable with around 15%.
...
Contrary to intuition, the driving factor for PCI-Express bus width and speed for most games is the framerate, not resolution, and our benchmarks conclusively show that the performance difference between PCIe configurations shrinks at higher resolution. This is because the bus transfers a fairly constant amount of scene and texture data - for each frame."
For compute tasks the degradation is entire in line with what you expect. With half the bandwidth you lose half the performance for transferring data but compute bound tasks still run pretty well.
What makes using TB for GPUs highly useful is the ability to take a 12" MacBook and gain 80+% of the power for gaming and a significant improvement for many GP-GPU tasks over using just the IGP.
The next generation of the high-speed Thunderbolt specification was announced on Tuesday, ditching the legacy Mini DisplayPort connector for the new smaller, reversible USB-C standard, and offering transfer speeds of up to 40Gbps with high-end cables.
That's... actually a really good idea.
Thunderbolt 3 will be a "superset" for USB 3.1, which runs at 10Gbps. Using a standard USB-C cable, Thunderbolt 3 will offer transfer speeds of twice that, at 20Gbps.
Being compatible with standard USB-C cables? That's a really good idea.
Apple was among the first to adopt the new USB-C connector with its all-new 12-inch MacBook, featuring a single USB-C port for both charging and connecting devices. USB-C is reversible, like Apple's proprietary Lightning connector, but the open standard is expected to be adopted by most forthcoming PCs and will not be limited to Apple hardware.
That's also a really good idea.
Of course, it's still all dependent on whether they can come up with some kind of hub so you can have a star topology, because if you're still stuck with those stupid single-port Thunderbolt devices that have been prevalent so far, you'll lose not only the display port, but your USB and charging ports as well.
Of course, the biggest determining factor in whether this new reborn Thunderbolt will find any success is what the prices are going to be. Hopefully by combining with USB's infrastructure, they've managed to bring the costs down a bit.
What makes using TB for GPUs highly useful is the ability to take a 12" MacBook and gain 80+% of the power for gaming and a significant improvement for many GP-GPU tasks over using just the IGP.
Being able to hook up a powerful GPU would be very beneficial in some cases and the results are great:
[VIDEO]
The setup isn't great though and expensive. That's a $900 chassis plus an extra power supply plus a $400 GPU. Intel's Broadwell IGP actually looks pretty good, it was tested here in the desktop model:
They said they ran Bioshock Infinite at 1080p ultra at 22FPS and they said the power consumption is just 10-12W. The 850M and 950M run that game at 30FPS at that level:
but they're using far more power (40-50W). Iris Pro 5200 runs it at 10FPS and the 650M/750M around 18FPS. The top of the line desktop GPU, the GTX 980 runs it at 114FPS, the 980Ti is about 30% more so say 150FPS.
If there was an external GPU solution about $500 for the complete setup and somewhere between 2x-6x the Iris Pro then it would be a good option for some people, especially with a long enough cable that the GPU can sit further away.
It would be better if Intel made the GPU though because AMD and NVidia don't like supporting anything Intel does and Thunderbolt is from Intel so it won't get official driver support as it would require getting certified by Intel. Intel is already making little compute sticks. I reckon a 100W Skylake Iris Pro-type GPU would perform pretty well. Intel is aiming to get Skylake at 50% faster than Broadwell so that's already 850M/950M but still 1/5th of a 980Ti. So they make essentially a quad version of Iris Pro with about 288 EUs at ~100W stuck to a ~150W USB C power adaptor. You'd get GTX 980 level of performance (probably better OpenCL performance) while plugged into a 12" MB and it would charge it at the same time. Mac Pro buyers could even buy one each per port to get a total of 8 GPUs for compute tasks.
With thinking like that I assume you never upgraded to HD anything and stay at 1024x768. Those damn new technologies and all.
There's a huge difference between a thing you can see and a thing you cannot see. Few people are aware of the difference between retina and non-retina until they use retina for weeks and have to go back to non-retina. The same is likely not true with a TV watcher going between 5K and 8K... unless the screen size is obscene. More importantly, the content isn't out there, has no medium for distribution, and consumes vast amounts of storage and bandwidth. And that's just 4/5K. 8K? Yeah right. Not this decade. Not for consumers. Not even likely for enthusiasts.
My mistake, you need a bandwidth of about 130Gbps to stream 8K video at 60fps so such a bandwidth is a long way off then and really not needed anytime soon...
Even today streaming only works because so few use it.
Many people still use Firewire. I have a 2008 Macbook Pro and Mac Pro. Those machines still work very well. Some did not understand my statement earlier. The point I was trying to make is the new protocol USB-C embracing TB3 is going to cause a lot of simplified cabling and a pain for a lot of us with older tech.
That is not something that is unique to the transition to USB-C though. I have whole draws full of specialized to support past technologies. Most of them are useless these days. You are really complaining about the cost of doing business here and frankly you go after the technology you need new find a way to pay for it.
Sooner or later, your 2007 Macbook Pro and my computers will be obsolete. No more firewire ports or even display port. Apple is giving you a "heads up" with their plans with the introduction of the new Macbook with 1 USB-C port.
Proof that even Apple can and does do stupid things.
I just bought some display port cables recently for my new LG monitor. Boy, do I feel stupid. With this new protocol, this transition to USB-C is going to be expensive... Just for new cables. I was hoping someone knew of a cable recycler so I can at least get a little bit of my money back for all these cables I have in my office. $1 a cable would be fine with me.
Hey how about taking my decades old SCSI cables off my hands? Ultimately the old hardware either becomes trash or gets recycled into something different.
Comments
Yeah. My guess is that much of the data swizzling to convert USB 3.1 to/from TB 3 is going to be done by the CPU to keep things cheap (at the expense of overall system performance). Again, my experience is more with Firewire when each device would have dedicated hardware which removed the need for bus management and data swizzling to be done by the CPU (but made devices more expensive). But it's likely the same story with TB.
And yeah, I agree that the lack of documentation is a bit frustrating (and leads to more speculation).
Wrong. Thunderbolt still requires a dedicated controller. The Alpine Ridge controller for TB3 just adds in USB 3.1 support. USB is the legacy protocol here.
Wrong. Thunderbolt still requires a dedicated controller. The Alpine Ridge controller for TB3 just adds in USB 3.1 support. USB is the legacy protocol here.
Right, so computers which support TB 3 will have dedicated hardware for adapting to USB 3.1 devices rather than relying on the CPU (as I figured). I was speculating about hooking up a TB 3 device to a USB 3.1 connector (and having compatibility in that direction, albeit with lower speed and power) if that's even possible. My guess is that, if it is possible, it would require the CPU to do the heavy lifting rather than having dedicated hardware to do so (like TB 3 devices would).
Are those not the same thing?
60Hz refers to the display refresh rate. For example my iMac 5K has 60Hz refresh rate all the time, whether I'm watching a video or not.
60 fps refers to how fast a video was recorded. It can also refer to the capability of the computer to play back that video without dropping frames.
60Hz is sort of slow and 60 fps is sort of fast.
The original poster wrote 'supporting up to 8k video @ 60Hz' which lead me to believe that they meant 'video' as in a movie but perhaps they meant 8K resolution instead. Either way 60Hz at 8K would be pushing the envelope for sure.
And i guess the 5 people on earth who need 8K monitors will do that, then
With thinking like that I assume you never upgraded to HD anything and stay at 1024x768. Those damn new technologies and all.
Apple said that USB-C is the future. Tying it together with TB3 is very smart. Now, what am I going to do with all these different cables I have been collecting over the years. I even have old first generation USB with my going to be totally phased out firewire stuff. Is there a cable recycler out there?
A clever move by those behind Thunderbolt, making the USB versus Thunderbolt debate pointless.
It will be a good way of simultaneously maintaining physical compatibility and differentiating high end machines: low end computers will ship with the slower ports or even legacy USB 3.0 ports; high end machines will have the advantages and faster throughput of Thunderbolt 3 but still be able to use the slower peripherals.
Just how much of a hand did Apple have in creating Thunderbolt 3?
I'm not sure if it's entirely clever. Now the market will be filled with USB-C connectors, some supporting only USB and some supporting Thunderbolt. It will be a mess.
Apple said that USB-C is the future. Tying it together with TB3 is very smart. Now, what am I going to do with all these different cables I have been collecting over the years. I even have old first generation USB with my going to be totally phased out firewire stuff. Is there a cable recycler out there?
I still use a Firewire-400 external drive on my 2007 MacBook Pro. Works like a charm.
I still use a Firewire-400 external drive on my 2007 MacBook Pro. Works like a charm.
I have an older Sony consumer 1080 video camera that has FW 400 cable, compact to full size 6 pin. I had to buy a FW 400-female -> 800 male adapter plus a TB to FW adapter to use the camera with my new MBP. It cost nearly $50 in adapters to use old camera with a new computer. I guess the good thing is that they will continue to make adapters for all different situations.
True, but the real news here (not mentioned in the article) is that TB3 adds support for DisplayPort 1.3 (32.4 Gbit/s, supporting up to 8k video @ 60Hz, or 4k 3D @ 60Hz) and HDMI 2.0 (4k @ 60Hz, HDR video, hi-rez audio).
Thank you. It's like this article went out of its way to bury the important news.
why wait? by the time you're reading for the next update there will talk of TB4.
but your tools when you need your tools, and you'll always get value from them.
During the keynote, Intel rolled out a giant ball to show how much cabling people have:
[VIDEO]
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9325/computex-2015-intel-keynote-live-blog
They said on average people have 6 cables each. The keynote was pretty neat relative to their past ones, lots of new tech coming. They showed off 360 degree 4K camera recording, no password logins using facial recognition, possibly using 3D scanning which was shown off too, their wireless charging, data and display, they mentioned external GPUs. They had the new Iris Pro GPUs, which Apple skipped this time.
Having a single port with the MB helps with a push towards wireless because if people don't have enough ports then they will be more inclined to use wireless for everything. If someone has a USB drive, an external display and a charger to all plug in at the same time, it's more likely that they will be coerced into adopting wireless charging + a WiGig drive and then just plug their display in or some other combination. With more ports, people just wouldn't change because it costs more and they have the cables. People have to be forced to avoid going the path of least resistance for their long-term benefit. Apple has always had to force change on people and they've always been met with resistance.
I expect the next Thunderbolt display can be a wireless display too. Intel WiDi supports 4K:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/intel-broadwell-4k-streaming,news-20261.html
Even if it's a 5K display, you're not going to be able to tell 4K upscaled to it because it gets downscaled to a working resolution anyway. Someone could buy a 12" MB, a TB display, wireless SD cards, drives and some Rezence charging pad or an Apple solution (e.g a brick that can charge the laptop plus other devices just sitting near them) and the cables/ports won't be much of an issue at all. I don't think they can ever get rid of that last port because of diagnostics and raw performance.
Many people still use Firewire. I have a 2008 Macbook Pro and Mac Pro. Those machines still work very well. Some did not understand my statement earlier. The point I was trying to make is the new protocol USB-C embracing TB3 is going to cause a lot of simplified cabling and a pain for a lot of us with older tech. Sooner or later, your 2007 Macbook Pro and my computers will be obsolete. No more firewire ports or even display port. Apple is giving you a "heads up" with their plans with the introduction of the new Macbook with 1 USB-C port. I just bought some display port cables recently for my new LG monitor. Boy, do I feel stupid. With this new protocol, this transition to USB-C is going to be expensive... Just for new cables. I was hoping someone knew of a cable recycler so I can at least get a little bit of my money back for all these cables I have in my office. $1 a cable would be fine with me.
With thinking like that I assume you never upgraded to HD anything and stay at 1024x768. Those damn new technologies and all.
CRT screens were good enough for my grandfather and they are good enough for me dammit! #480p4life
In a nut shell it will hardly be worthwhile to use an external TB connected GPU in the overwhelming majority of the cases.
This is such BS. The overwhelming majority of the cases is gaming and the difference is going to be about 15% between native PCIe x16 and over TB. Performance is still FAR better than the performance of even the new Intel IGPs.
"Real performance losses only become apparent in x8 1.1 and x4 2.0, where the performance drop becomes noticeable with around 15%.
...
Contrary to intuition, the driving factor for PCI-Express bus width and speed for most games is the framerate, not resolution, and our benchmarks conclusively show that the performance difference between PCIe configurations shrinks at higher resolution. This is because the bus transfers a fairly constant amount of scene and texture data - for each frame."
For compute tasks the degradation is entire in line with what you expect. With half the bandwidth you lose half the performance for transferring data but compute bound tasks still run pretty well.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Performance-of-Xeon-Phi-on-PCIe-X8-517/
What makes using TB for GPUs highly useful is the ability to take a 12" MacBook and gain 80+% of the power for gaming and a significant improvement for many GP-GPU tasks over using just the IGP.
Being compatible with standard USB-C cables? That's a really good idea.
That's also a really good idea.
Of course, it's still all dependent on whether they can come up with some kind of hub so you can have a star topology, because if you're still stuck with those stupid single-port Thunderbolt devices that have been prevalent so far, you'll lose not only the display port, but your USB and charging ports as well.
Of course, the biggest determining factor in whether this new reborn Thunderbolt will find any success is what the prices are going to be. Hopefully by combining with USB's infrastructure, they've managed to bring the costs down a bit.
Being able to hook up a powerful GPU would be very beneficial in some cases and the results are great:
[VIDEO]
The setup isn't great though and expensive. That's a $900 chassis plus an extra power supply plus a $400 GPU. Intel's Broadwell IGP actually looks pretty good, it was tested here in the desktop model:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-6.html
They said they ran Bioshock Infinite at 1080p ultra at 22FPS and they said the power consumption is just 10-12W. The 850M and 950M run that game at 30FPS at that level:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M.138026.0.html
but they're using far more power (40-50W). Iris Pro 5200 runs it at 10FPS and the 650M/750M around 18FPS. The top of the line desktop GPU, the GTX 980 runs it at 114FPS, the 980Ti is about 30% more so say 150FPS.
If there was an external GPU solution about $500 for the complete setup and somewhere between 2x-6x the Iris Pro then it would be a good option for some people, especially with a long enough cable that the GPU can sit further away.
It would be better if Intel made the GPU though because AMD and NVidia don't like supporting anything Intel does and Thunderbolt is from Intel so it won't get official driver support as it would require getting certified by Intel. Intel is already making little compute sticks. I reckon a 100W Skylake Iris Pro-type GPU would perform pretty well. Intel is aiming to get Skylake at 50% faster than Broadwell so that's already 850M/950M but still 1/5th of a 980Ti. So they make essentially a quad version of Iris Pro with about 288 EUs at ~100W stuck to a ~150W USB C power adaptor. You'd get GTX 980 level of performance (probably better OpenCL performance) while plugged into a 12" MB and it would charge it at the same time. Mac Pro buyers could even buy one each per port to get a total of 8 GPUs for compute tasks.
There's a huge difference between a thing you can see and a thing you cannot see. Few people are aware of the difference between retina and non-retina until they use retina for weeks and have to go back to non-retina. The same is likely not true with a TV watcher going between 5K and 8K... unless the screen size is obscene. More importantly, the content isn't out there, has no medium for distribution, and consumes vast amounts of storage and bandwidth. And that's just 4/5K. 8K? Yeah right. Not this decade. Not for consumers. Not even likely for enthusiasts.
Even today streaming only works because so few use it.
Hey how about taking my decades old SCSI cables off my hands? Ultimately the old hardware either becomes trash or gets recycled into something different.