News - Intel doubles Thunderbolt throughput to 20Gbps

[HEXUS]

New spec will support simultaneous 4K video transfer and display.

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[Sc0rian]

this is pretty cool.

Home NAS -> PC.

[miniyazz]

Wish it were more widely available/cheaper as it has a lot of potential!

[Chaoss]

I really hope this or USB4 becomes the sole interface, having all these different connectors for everything seems really outdated, just have 1 interface for everything including internal hard drives and stuff and be done with it

[agello24]

did they fix the heat issues with the cables? thats the reason why i wont go past usb 3.0.

[Pleiades]

I hope there's going to be bigger monitors than a mere 23" available for Retina at launch. 4k deserves 32" at least I would aver.

[watercooled]

It looks like this is more an implementation change rather than any sort of speed boost - they're moving from two separate bi-directional 10Gbps lanes to a single bi-directional 20Gbps 'lane', presumably via some sort of controller-based aggregation.

Wide adoption is unlikely vs USB though when the owners are strangling it with absurd licensing fees and complete platform control. Saying that, I'd rather use a proper external interface like USB than essentially using a system bus and opening the whole system up to compromise if a malicious device is attached...

[Lazerballz]

20 Gbps is nice however if an SSD or Hard disk is placed in an casing that is SATA3 then the bottleneck is still the SATA port.

Apart from that I never heard anyone complaining about the 10 Gbps limit of the current TB.

[MercutioUK]

The big thing this tech is going to bring is allowing the external housing of PCIe cards.

Be it, raid cards (with drives) in a box, an external GPU (so full fat graphics cards for this nice new generation of Haswell laptops that are around the corner) or a decent sound card - or even all of these, in a case.

There's a HELL of a lot of interesting stuff starts happening when interconnects start catching up to the speed of internal connectors. Forget "will it make my external hard drive faster" that's not where these are going to excel.

My next desktop is going to be a laptop. Best CPU I can afford, a fairly potent graphics card, SSD drives, etc, etc, everything you'd want from a good (but not extreme) laptop then thunderbolt with a hardware raid, high end graphics card (plugged into a nice screen ofc) and my sound card attached (uses dolby encode to a decent set of speakers).

Take it away from home and it's a fairly badass laptop. Take it home, slide it into a dock (I'll make one if I have to) with the thunderbolt connector and it's a high end desktop. I see a LOT of folks going this way when the kits available.

[MercutioUK]

The people complaining about the 10GB/sec are those trying to run external PCIe bridge boards. Have a google and you'll find them pretty quickly.