But the CPU and chipset need to talk to all those ports. If any USB-C port can suddenly need to do Thunderbolt 3, that’s ridiculous bandwidth requirements. You probably can’t do that to 8 ports on anything.
This is exactly the sort of problem that tends to go away over time (often before it becomes an actual problem for very many people). The PCI-E and even RAM bandwidth of modern chipsets would have been absolutely astounding 10 years ago.
Re:The impossible dream of USB-C
by Dylan16807 on Sunday October 15, 2017 @12:45AM
(#15475934)
You can share bandwidth among the ports. The default option for 8 ports would use 4 PCIe lanes for each pair of ports. But even full bandwidth for all ports is 32 lanes, not too hard to do.
How many lanes does your CPU have?
Re:The impossible dream of USB-C
by Dylan16807 on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:00PM
(#15477962)
Not enough, because it's six year old tech.
But even my CPU could manage to have 8 lanes feeding a GPU and 8 lanes feeding a switch for the thunderbolt ports, something that provides enough bandwidth for the vast majority of use cases.
> As those old ports become more obsolete they won't disappear, they will be repurposed as USB-C.
... But they have already disappeared. The 13" Macbook Pro that I'm talking about just has those two USB-C ports and none of the others. If you are plugged in for power you just have one port.
If you buy a 13" laptop you make concessions for on-device connectors, as you always have for ultra-portables. The solution is the same as it's always been, get a larger laptop, or use a connector hub. As for your Macbook Pro, that's Apple. Using the one company that's known for doing their own thing and obsoleting ports before every other company does as your case for USB-C having caused other ports disappear already isn't a convincing to me. For example, the touch bar version of the Macbook Pro 13" has four USB-C ports. Apple has made a decision to obsolete USB-A. I'm not surprised, for the reasons I gave before.
> If you buy a 13" laptop you make concessions for on-device connectors, as you always have for ultra-portables.
My old 10.1" has:
* 1 power connector
* 1 ethernet connector
* 1 VGA connector
* 3 USB ports
* 2 audio jacks
* 1 memory card slot
* 1 mysterious connector
Re:The impossible dream of USB-C
by semi-extrinsic on Sunday October 15, 2017 @04:19AM
(#15476351)
Apple is very happy to sell you a $$$$ phone/laptop and then $$ dongles to make it actually work with the other things in the world.
This is old, but still gold
For me, I'm enjoying the power of the USB-c/Thunderbolt connector on my Dell XPS. I use a docking station, which I'm sending 4k video and audio out to while receiving video, mouse, ethernet and power over the same cable. One cable docking is amazing, and really shows off the possibilities of the technology (although in this case I'm pretty sure it's Thunderbolt doing the heavy lifting).