> I'd be really surprised if you could drive, say, a very high resolution monitor off USB 3.0.
You definitely can't. But then again, you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable.
Technically, you could implement a pretty crummy external video card driven by thunderbolt (may be useful for laptops, as additional oomph), but I don't think you'd usually do that.
But if you want to go into technicalities, USB3's SuperSpeed raw throughput is 4Gbps (5Gbps theoretical max), 3.2Gbps expected after protocol overhead. That's 400MB/s (full-duplex) (note that this 64% effective throughput is an impressive progress over USB2, which rarely reaches 50% of its theoretical 480Mbps throughput).
Thunderbolt is specced at 2x10Gbps (two channels per cable), full-duplex. And because it has a much lighter protocol (close to PCI-E) it should be able to reach a much higher efficiency than USB3.
It also has a significantly lower latency, even at the end of a daisy chain, than USB.
...you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable.
No and yes, respectively... sending DisplayPort over the wire is a feature of Thunderbolt, not something you 'do with the same cable'. You can also theoretically drive a monitor with PCI Express, the other half of the Thunderbolt bus.
You definitely can't. But then again, you don't do that either with Thunderbolt. You do that with the DisplayPort signal that goes into the same cable.
Technically, you could implement a pretty crummy external video card driven by thunderbolt (may be useful for laptops, as additional oomph), but I don't think you'd usually do that.
But if you want to go into technicalities, USB3's SuperSpeed raw throughput is 4Gbps (5Gbps theoretical max), 3.2Gbps expected after protocol overhead. That's 400MB/s (full-duplex) (note that this 64% effective throughput is an impressive progress over USB2, which rarely reaches 50% of its theoretical 480Mbps throughput).
Thunderbolt is specced at 2x10Gbps (two channels per cable), full-duplex. And because it has a much lighter protocol (close to PCI-E) it should be able to reach a much higher efficiency than USB3.
It also has a significantly lower latency, even at the end of a daisy chain, than USB.