Intel Executive Posts Thunderbolt 5 Photo then Deletes It: 80 Gbps and PAM-3
In this image we can see a poster on the wall showcasing '80G PHY Technology', which means that Intel is working on a physical layer (PHY) for 80 Gbps connections. Off the bat this is double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4, which runs at 40 Gbps.
The second line confirms that this is 'USB 80G is targeted to support the existing USB-C ecosystem', which follows along that Intel is aiming to maintain the USB-C connector but double the effective bandwidth.
The third line is actually where it gets technically interesting. 'The PHY will be based on novel PAM-3 modulation technology'.
USB4 Gen 3×2 has a maximum throughput of 40 Gbps. USB4 products that support all the optional functionality can be branded as Thunderbolt 4. We can expect 80 Gbps USB5 at some point. Type C is the connector, as Type A is already deprecated for 20 Gbps and up ports.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @09:41AM (10 children)
More seriously, I am not sure what the market is. Probably not consumer?
In the rare cases when I need to use USB for data transfer, the speed is not really something I care about.
It seems to me that for consumers, USB will just be a charging connector or for displayport. With this kind of bandwidth not really used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @10:46AM
Many Soylenters will welcome the ability to transfer their entire porn collections in under five minutes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 03 2021, @01:57PM
Well, maybe their goal is to make the U in USB actually "universal", as in, the only kind of connector you'll see in the future, where you plug anything from your mouse to your Raid storage unit into each other with USB.
As a security person, I salivate at the prospect, to be honest. Because right now, USB is the Bluetooth of wired connectivity: A wealth of exploits.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 03 2021, @01:59PM (3 children)
80 Gbps would cover DisplayPort 2 without using Alt Mode [9to5mac.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday August 03 2021, @02:42PM (2 children)
I was reading the comments on that link. It seems there's still some confusion about direction of data flow and cables. It sounds like a clusterfuck. There's definitely nothing universal about this.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday August 03 2021, @02:47PM (1 child)
It's universally despised.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday August 03 2021, @08:00PM
Lol! Wish I had mod points because that's some funny stuff.
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday August 03 2021, @03:06PM (1 child)
You say that but once you get used to speed there is rarely any way you want to go back. A while back I found some old old USB sticks and reading was probably ok but writing to them was horrifically slow. You just never want to go back on speed once you experiences something faster.
That said I do wonder why they are holding it back? If they are holding this back what else are they holding back? Is it that technological progress was "to fast" for some time and they had to portion the goodies out over time?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @11:04PM
I think everything has diminishing returns at some point though depending on your specific needs. The average consumer transferring documents around vs someone in a specialty field that needs to work with a lot of data. In the past perhaps the speeds weren't really fast enough for your average consumer but as bandwidth improved any additional speed has diminishing returns to the average consumer.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday August 04 2021, @01:18PM (1 child)
Bought a new laptop recently with USB-C, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort 1.4, etc.
First, it runs a VR headset at 90Hz flawlessly. The data for that is no small thing, and my headset is old by modern standards.
Second, the new laptop came with two NVMe slots only. I wanted to upgrade one (from 1Tb), so I needed to image one of them across to an external drive. I picked up a cheap, junky USB-C NVMe adaptor on Amazon. I plugged in the NVMe into it and started the process to image from the internal NVMe to this external one on USB-C. Started the process, walked away.
I wasn't gone ten minutes. It was done when I came back. The NVMe on a USB-C port behaves faster than some internal SSDs I've used.
When you're talking high-res external displays that you want to hot-plug from a small docking station, when you're talking connectivity of something meaty, when you're talking transfer times an order of magnitude smaller for backups, etc. then USB-C and Thunderbolt definitely have their uses.
Thunderbolt puts PCIe and DisplayPort into the USB-C connector. So you can connect things like entire graphics cards if you so wish.
I can remember thinking the same about USB1 vs USB2, and then they went to USB3, and THEN they changed the connector. But each time, new speeds and facilities that weren't previously possible suddenly became not just viable but commodity.
One port on my laptop can supply 100W of power, run multiple DisplayPort displays, push four PCIe x 16 lanes down the cable, and let me plug in USB devices.
In work, we've replaced all the fancy docking stations and connectors and switches with just a USB-C dock. They do video (HDMI, VGA and DisplayPort), audio, Gigabit network, multiple USB slots and charge the device you're plugging in if you want. All in one single USB-C connector.
The market is precisely things like that, bigger and bigger screens, people roaming with laptops, people docking them for work, people running VR games (e.g. 2 x 4K screens at the same time as their normal screens, with the most minimal latency possible) and/or plugging in literal PCIe cards into a laptop or mobile device, people using NVMe's instead of USB sticks even (my NVMe over USB-C just appears like a USB stick... apart from the fact it gets warm, you can't tell the difference and yet it stores and accesses files with incredible speed on any USB-C connected machine).
Sure, 90% of people won't make use of it. And 99% of the time, even those that do won't actually BE using it. But the same can be sad of PCIe, USB itself, Bluetooth, just about anything.
But I spent years waiting for USB to be able to do even Gigabit Ethernet. To be able to do DVI/VGA over it as a cheap expansion for a second screen. For years, the cables and protocols simply weren't able to keep up. Now they can, and they exceed. And now they are at these kinds of speeds, you can do virtually anything that your computer is capable of, over a USB-pluggable cable - from adding in a GPU to powering a dozen screens at once, or transferring things as fast as the fastest storage available if you buy the right thing.
The more we can shove down even a single USB-C cable means the more use you can get out of even a cheap Chromebook or smartphone that has only a single USB-C cable. As it is, docking a Chromebook, phone or laptop into a USB-C dock basically gives you connectivity far in excess of what desktops are supplied with by default. My little £20 box off Amazon has about ten functions that it can do all at the same time, and that's not even past USB3 really.
But, for me, the technology is worth it mostly because those speeds quickly become commodity, therefore even simple things like transferring a terabyte over a USB-C cable for a one-off action take a matter of minutes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @05:01PM
NVMe is a protocol. The slots/connectors are are either PCIe express ports or m.2.