

Thunderbolt Meets USB (At Last) - tosh
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbolt-3

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tosh
> Meanwhile gamers will be happy to hear that Intel is finally moving forward
> on external graphics via Thunderbolt, and after more than a few false
> starts, external GPUs now have the company’s blessing and support. While
> Thunderbolt has in theory always been able of supporting external graphics
> (it’s just a PCIe bus), the biggest hold-up has always been handling what to
> do about GPU hot-plugging and the so-called “surprise removal” scenario.
> Intel tells us that they have since solved that problem, and are now able to
> move forward with external graphics. The company is initially partnering
> with AMD on this endeavor – though nothing excludes NVIDIA in the long-run –
> with concepts being floated for both a full power external Thunderbolt card
> chassis, and a smaller “graphics dock” which contains a smaller, cooler (but
> still more powerful than an iGPU) mobile discrete GPU.

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Osmium
Is 40 Gbps sufficient for modern graphics cards? (I genuinely have no idea,
but I know there was a concern that previous versions of Thunderbolt wouldn't
have enough bandwidth, and it's still a lot less than PCIe x16).

It'd be really nice to see Apple get on board with this. I'd love a thin-and-
light laptop with the option of a dedicated graphics at my desk.

~~~
Criten
Looks like 40 Gbps is around the same as PCIe x16 v1.X.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express)

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chanux
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9645013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9645013)

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Sanddancer
Has intel said anything about loosening their grip on the thunderbolt spec to
make it easier for people to implement thunderbolt on devices? I can rather
easily download the datasheets for intel's processors, their chipsets, etc,
without registering for a site or anything, but not the info on their
thunderbolt controllers. It seems just a bit silly that I can get more info on
their top of the line $3000 processors than their $10 thunderbolt chips.

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legulere
Hmm interesting to hear that now passive cables are possible (albeit only
20GBit/s). This will surely drive the ridiculously high thunderbolt cable
prices down. I wonder if this still requires special thunderbolt cables or
wether it will work over fully-connected standard usb-c cables.

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lnanek2
Technically it all sounds nice, but in actually practice I will never, ever
use a computer with only a single USB-C port for power and all USB
accessories. Pry my better designed and more usable laptops out of my cold
dead hands. :) Hopefully Apple changes their mind.

