

Thunderbolt 3 Overview [pdf] - fezz
https://thunderbolttechnology.net/sites/default/files/Thunderbolt_3_Overview_Brief_FINAL.pdf

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lewisl9029
WiGig is a more practical technology, in my humble opinion.

I have a WiGig-enabled laptop and a WiGig dock with 3 1080p monitors, a
Ethernet cable, and all of my peripherals connected to the dock including a 10
port hub with a USB3 HDD.

I can transfer files to my HDD (80MB/s), to the network (90MB/s), play 1080p
videos on 1 monitor, browser on another, and play games on the last one
without noticing any latency at all.

And I can move my laptop to the other side of the room without any noticeable
connection issues, which is pretty surprising considering they're advertising
WiGig as a short-range wireless technology (although having large obstructions
between the laptop and the dock will cause problems very quickly).

For a first-gen product, I'm pretty impressed. The room-wide wireless gigabit
Ethernet alone is already a killer feature for me, but the multiple wireless
displays and peripherals makes for an even more amazing package. Can't wait to
see how they iterate on it.

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bluthru
Really impressive that this can handle basically everything that's thrown at
it. "Yeah, it'll provide power and is backwards compatible with other
protocols. External GPU to game with your laptop? No problem. Oh, and the
connector is smaller than before, too."

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steve19
That was the promise of thunderbird 2 (or 1)...

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masklinn
Not quite, eGPU wasn't officially supported for instance. Port compatibility
with USB (and thus not having to give up USB ports) might also be a big
factor, and TB2 power delivery, while higher than pre Power Delivery USB, was
only 10W IIRC.

The problem remains the extra cost of integrating TB. Hopefully the cost will
come down with Alpine Ridge.

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KevinMS
Can somebody give me a quick overview of how and when to spend my money on
this?

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modfodder
As a video editor that deals with terabytes of footage, in practice
thunderbolt is much faster than USB3. It's common that i have to copy 1-4
terrabytes onto several drives for editors, fx artists, archival, etc usually
on deadline. I don't care that thunderbolt isn't as ubiquitous as usb, but
like firewire before it, I'm glad it's there and common enough.

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DiabloD3
Except that many companies use large scale centralized network storage and are
exporting the files over their network protocol of choice, and only need local
storage for caching, temp, and swap.

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modfodder
That's nice in theory but every post house I've worked at still needs plenty
of thunderbolt and usb drives. The footage isn't shot at the post house, it
has to be transported and copied over to the SAN, and everything is on a tight
deadline so it needs to be done yesterday. Or rather than using the in house
colorist (or fx artist) the client decides to go with someone else, so that
often means copying footage for that delivery. And the client wants two copies
of it, one for archive and one because the creative director wants to dick
around with it. Or the post house is over-booked and the only edit station is
an imac not connected to the SAN, so copy it over to a drive so someone can
start working. Plus with everything shot on digital it's not unheard of to get
20 or more hours of footage for a campaign. On a RED or ARRI, that takes up a
lot of space.

Half my work now is out of my home now, I don't need a SAN, instead clients
ship me a thunderbolt raid (typically a G-Raid) that I ship back once the
project is finished. And I know more and more editors and motion graphic
artists who are doing the same, less work in edit suites, more work at home.
Fast, portable drives makes that possible (and efficient high quality codecs
like ProRes and h264).

I've been doing this for 20 years, we'll still need fast, portable storage for
many years to come and right now, for video editing, Thunderbolt is the best
choice.

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Tiksi
Wouldn't something like eSATA be a better choice? The hdd's speed would be the
limiting factor instead of the bus.

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cmsj
SATA tops out at 6Gb/s. One 7200 rpm spindle might not be able to saturate
that, but a RAID array could, and any decent, single SSD would trivially
saturate it.

So, for the kind of use case where you need to move lots of data, very
quickly, eSATA may not be better :)

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Tiksi
Well yeah, but a single ssd wouldn't hold lots of data, and for the use case
described, I assume its a spinning rust drive. Also you wouldn't run a large
raid array over a single sata bus, at the very least you'd use SAS and get
multiple channels in one cable.

Edit: The g-raid mentioned looks like a 2x spinning array, so well within the
limits of a single sata III bus.

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modfodder
esata is less ubiquitous than both USB and Thunderbolt (and firewire before
it). External ports have never been standard on any macs and I don't ever
remember them being standard on any of the HP machines we used (the majority
of big budget editorial, i.e. feature films, tv, and commercials, are cut on
macs, although fx leans heavily toward Windows and Linux). We use to install
esata ports on some of our machine room systems, as the speed difference was
definitely useful. I wish esata would have become more common but at the
moment Thunderbolt makes it unnecessary (and USB3 seems to have stifled it's
standard adoption across non-Apple systems).

Also, aside from the G-Raid, we also use 1 and 2tb SSD's (more for portability
than the extra speed).

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DiabloD3
Intel continues to refuse to deploy Thunderbolt by default on Z series
chipsets (Z87, Z97, Zwhatever LGA1151/Broadwell uses).

I'd love to adopt Thunderbolt, Intel literally refuses to sell it to me.

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wmf
There are plenty of Z97 motherboards with Thunderbolt:
[https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products?tid=15&field_comp...](https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products?tid=15&field_company_nid=All&field_prod_os_value_many_to_one=All&field_prod_tb_version_value_many_to_one=tbv2)
I don't understand why it matters whether it's default or not.

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DiabloD3
Neither of my Z97 motherboards come with it, it is roughly a $100 premium to
get it.

If it doesn't come with systems by default, no one is going to use it. I'm
interested in it purely for IP-over-Thunderbolt.

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wmf
Yeah, in retrospect Intel probably should have forced millions of people to
pay extra so that DiabloD3 could save some money on his home LAN.

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DiabloD3
Not really. It costs about as much to put Thunderbolt on a board (especially
when the board already has a DisplayPort port wired into the on-die GPU) as it
does to put USB 3 on a board.

It is merely a few cents in parts. There is literally no reason why Intel just
doesn't put Thunderbolt everywhere.

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gcb0
> It is merely a few cents in parts

someone never worked with intel integrated.

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DiabloD3
That isn't the issue. Its an Intel platform and Intel _wants_ to lock everyone
into their platform... which requires the platform to be as accessible and
ubiquitous as possible.

Limiting Thunderbolt to a few computers no one owns (except Apple products,
Thunderbolt is everywhere there) basically signs Thunderbolt's death.

Thunderbolt 3 is now fast enough that I can do 40gbit Ethernet over it. With
the upcoming PCI-E 4.0 standard, that is 2-3 lanes worth of bandwidth.

Yet, Intel isn't storming the industry and trying to legitimately compete with
USB 3.x.

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mkautzm
The problem I foresee with Thunderbolt 3 is that it's serving a use that few
people need at a price that no one wants to pay. The price-point issues might
disappear with the USB-C compatibility, but even then, the only time I can
ever foresee me actually reaching for Thunderbolt is for a display when DP 1.3
isn't an option or when huge data xfers were commonplace.

Unless it competes on price point with USB, I can't see this being any more
popular than previous iterations of the protocol.

Maybe that'd change some if Intel actually put it on the enthusiast chipsets,
but even then, I think the price point is a pretty big turnoff.

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modfodder
I don't think it will ever be as ubiquitous as USB, but it doesn't have to be
useful. I'm a video editor and thunderbolt has saved me enough time copying
files that i'll gladly pay the price. The cost typically gets passed along to
clients and at rates of $100/hr or more for a single editor they'll happily
pay the extra cost of the drives if it saves a few hours over the life of a
project.

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slamus
OMG external graphics card !

