My experience with thunderbolt hubs has been frustrating. These ports and hubs usually advertise Gbps which I then convert to display usage + leftovers for usb data. Thing is, these hubs often have hidden restrictions. For example my thunderbolt 3 hub has support for two displays, but each one can only do 1440p/60hz despite the hdmi 2.0 spec and advertised port throughout being totally capable of pushing 120hz.<p>Also I had to get a usb extension for my wireless mouse dongle due to interference, not sure how they’d fix something like that though.
How's Thunderbolt going with AMD anyway? Got a 2nd hand Apple Thunderbolt Display in mint condition and really, really cheap, and used it as an excuse to upgrade my 'old' PC. Wanted a sff PC but couldn't find in the area any AMD that offered Thunderbolt.
I wonder if one day Thunderbolt+DisplayPort+USB hybrid (what some Type-C ports of today already are) will become the only connection interface we will use. It can replace HDMI (with a small and cheap adapter for HDMI-only displays), PCIex slots, OCuLink (not really an expert on these but why not?) and obviously SATA which already falls out of relevancy quickly. So why do we even need anything but full-featured Thunderbolt ports?
If a visitor were to go to such a facility, it's quite likely they'd have to sign an NDA and/or that their phone would be confiscated for the duration of their tour of this new technology. But let an executive in, phone in hand, and he does the very thing they're trying to prevent.<p>Makes me wonder what a Red Team could get away with.
So I assume this could be used in USB5 and DisplayPort 3.0 with 160Gbps? That should allow 8K Res at 120Hz without compression or something like 5K with 240Hz.<p>The certification of Thunderbolt still requires Intel's blessing though. So while it is royalty free and open standard there is still some barrier in getting AMD on board. Although from my view there isn't actually that much of consumer demand for Thunderbolt.
What can actually saturate that kind of a local link? PCIe 4.0 maxes out at 32 Gbps and 5.0 is increasing that to 63 for x16. x32 exists in the spec, but I'm curious what if anything actually implements that? Certainly not any consumer-grade boards.
We have one HN member here very adept in matters of interconnect: @deepnotderp<p>Saying from my IC design exposure really many years ago, those ultra fast, and ultra complex short range serial signalling methods are also ultra power hungry.<p>Past the PAM4, signalling over copper hits a power consumption wall where you can no longer get more speed by throwing more transistors at it, because any speed gains from extra signalling complexity start to be offset by the need to reduce the transmitter clock frequency to keep it from melting.<p>I believe PAM4 will be the swan song of sophisticated serial signalling before the industry switches to optics.<p>The industry possibly have one last trump cards in the sleeve: chord signalling, which is currently being developed by Kandabus. It's an extremely complex signalling scheme, with analog signal equalisation, and other signal conditioning techniques bordering on black magic. Its design cost, and complexity may well be higher than going straight to optics.