While this is nice, and Anandtech has a very detailed report about it, there is something that worries me. Intel has released the thunderbolt spec to a royalty free group. While this seems good, as we can see by this use of it here, my question is what it means for the future of the TB spec.
going back to the beginning, Intel stated that in ten years TB would be at 100Gb/s. It’s still at 40. We know all about the cable “problem”, which DisplayPort now shares. But that problem can be overcome with amplified cabling. At a cost, of course. But are we now at the end of the TB advance> with Intel giving the license out for free—no more charging OEMs for ports, does that mean they’re letting go of TB altogether? Nobody knows that outside of Intel right now.
intel did say specifically that even tough they are giving for free the the technology they are not
abandoning the specs and the TB spec will still be Intel property which they will continue to develop
and certify devices that use the spec.and USB 4 devices are not required to support the spec at all but they can be certified by USB IF for the spec. now for speed it might improve to 100 Gb/s when it would be 10yo (in 2021) since it is using PCIe signaling it might implement PCIE 4/5 and later on 6 after it would be released allowing higher Bandwidth.
and what you mean about the cable "problems" is their length ? currently TB3 can communicate at 40Gb/s on passive cables no longer than .5m and using active cables to use up to 3m. now the thing is with active cables is that they have electronics inside like DSP that help with signal attenuation, those
same electronics can be integrated to port electronics itself but the cost would move to the device you are buying whether it would be implemented to the cables or ports remains to be seen my guess they would use active cables, price would be higher for the new cables but look at the new HDMI 2.1 cables they are not cheap either.
While this is nice, and Anandtech has a very detailed report about it, there is something that worries me. Intel has released the thunderbolt spec to a royalty free group. While this seems good, as we can see by this use of it here, my question is what it means for the future of the TB spec.
going back to the beginning, Intel stated that in ten years TB would be at 100Gb/s. It’s still at 40. We know all about the cable “problem”, which DisplayPort now shares. But that problem can be overcome with amplified cabling. At a cost, of course. But are we now at the end of the TB advance> with Intel giving the license out for free—no more charging OEMs for ports, does that mean they’re letting go of TB altogether? Nobody knows that outside of Intel right now.
intel did say specifically that even tough they are giving for free the the technology they are not
abandoning the specs and the TB spec will still be Intel property which they will continue to develop
and certify devices that use the spec.and USB 4 devices are not required to support the spec at all but they can be certified by USB IF for the spec. now for speed it might improve to 100 Gb/s when it would be 10yo (in 2021) since it is using PCIe signaling it might implement PCIE 4/5 and later on 6 after it would be released allowing higher Bandwidth.
and what you mean about the cable "problems" is their length ? currently TB3 can communicate at 40Gb/s on passive cables no longer than .5m and using active cables to use up to 3m. now the thing is with active cables is that they have electronics inside like DSP that help with signal attenuation, those
same electronics can be integrated to port electronics itself but the cost would move to the device you are buying whether it would be implemented to the cables or ports remains to be seen my guess they would use active cables, price would be higher for the new cables but look at the new HDMI 2.1 cables they are not cheap either.
TB3 does *not* use PCIe signalling. It can transport PCIe but it isn't PCIe itself. (And thus, the advent of PCIe 4/5/6) does not directly show us TB's future.)
Nobody has ever implemented transceivers in TB ports instead of in the cables, AFAIK, and I don't think it's even feasible, as the signaling on the port is different than the signaling on the cable.
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