News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on USB4 Specification Announced: Adopting Thunderbolt 3 Protocol for 40 Gbps USB. Parent comment

Re:USB4 Specification Announced: Adopting Thunderbolt 3 Prot... by gumby on Monday March 04, 2019 @04:24PM (#19305685)
Thunderbolt is PCIe so instead of a backplane you can use a cable. So basically anything you'd use PCIe for (drives, external GPUs etc) you can use TB for.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:USB4 Specification Announced: Adopting Thunderbolt 3 Prot... by edwintorok on Monday March 04, 2019 @06:36PM (#19306776)
I'd be wary of plugging thunderbolt devices in, see http://thunderclap.io/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:USB4 Specification Announced: Adopting Thunderbolt 3 Prot... by woolvalley on Monday March 04, 2019 @04:32PM (#19305768)
Not quite, because the equivalent pure pcie connection is faster than thunderbolt due to the overhead in thunderbolt.

We need another doubling in thunderbolt's speed for it to not have a penalty when using eGPUs

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:USB4 Specification Announced: Adopting Thunderbolt 3 Prot... by gumby on Monday March 04, 2019 @04:58PM (#19306017)
It's been a few years since I was programming those things but IIRC the TB 3frames are comparable to PCIe 3 frames (terminology is slightly different between the two).

The real thing is that TB3 only has four lanes while Intel's server (and I believe some desktop) chipsets have 16-lane PCIe. Not sure about the mobile chipsets (again, I no longer follow this as closely/ as I used to). So indeed you won't be able to pump data into an eGPU as quickly as you could a high performance internal one. Or perhaps we should add "yet"?

[ Parent | on HN ]