design4use

Mike Wuerthele said:

Intel's published spec for TB3 still is explicit about no hub and spoke in TB3, so yeah. 

We'll see how it goes.

Don't get me wrong I'd love what OWC is saying and it's great news, if it works reliably.
For an extra fee you could overcome the 2 TB ports only restrictions on the new M1 macs which makes them inherently more useful to me!

jellybelly said:

TB4 is actually TB3 as we’ve had on the Mac all along (40 Gb/s). 

I am sure Larry O'Connor is very cool, and while this is true re:speed, how come no one was able to implement a hub structure even for the accessories on the market for Mac?
To my knowledge, Intel has said multiple times that there a few things that TB3 is tied to, among other things a daisy-chained expansion architecture. 

Mike Wuerthele said:

design4use said:

I think this works only for devices that support Thunderbolt 4, which allows for hub topology, unlike the daisy-chaining that Thunderbolt 3 requires. Thunderbolt 4 is only released on Intel 11th gen mobile chipsets, which a few early PC ultrabooks will be shipping with.

Confirmed: This works on any TB3 Mac with Big Sur.

We'll be discussing it more in December.

I'd love if this were true, as Intel said that Thunderbolt 3 is hardware (ie the controllers) limited to not being able support a tree-like hub topology - it's not a question of OS as far as I thought. But if true it would really help with devices that have only 2 TB ports.

[Edit] Going through the order flow OWC now added a dialog that lets you select TB3 Mac and M1 Mac vs a TB4 version.

I think this works only for devices that support Thunderbolt 4, which allows for hub topology, unlike the daisy-chaining that Thunderbolt 3 requires. Thunderbolt 4 is only released on Intel 11th gen mobile chipsets, which a few early PC ultrabooks will be shipping with.