Terrible name pending - Thunderbolt 80Gbps demoed

[BachChain]

Summary

During a "Technology Tour" of their Israel-based Development Center, Intel demonstrated a prototype of their newest thunderbolt revision. The demo ran two 40Gb thunderbolt lanes across a single USB-C cable, resulting in 80Gbps of total throughput, twice what the current Thunderbolt 4 standard is capable of. As of yet, the new spec remains unnamed.

 

Quotes

Quote

Intel didn't share many details, but the demo consisted of dual Thunderbolt lanes, with each running at 40 Gbps (for a total of 80 Gbps). That's twice the performance of Thunderbolt 4, which tops out at 40 Gbps in aggregate.

 

The 80 Gbps connection ran across a USB-C cable. Intel didn't announce a name for the faster interface or mention when it will come to market. For now, all we know is that it will double the speed of the existing Thunderbolt 4 connection.

 

Thunderbolt 4 currently leverages the USB 4 version 1.0 specification, and the new version of Thunderbolt employs the increased throughput of the USB 4 version 2.0 spec announced earlier this month.

 

My thoughts

I would suggest Thunderbolt 4.1 Gen2.1 2x2 V2.0

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-shows-first-thunderbolt-80-gbps-demo-with-two-links

[captain_to_fire]

Can they just rename it as Thunderbolt 5 or USB5? You know, simplify shopping for peripherals and not make consumers sound like a crazy person when buying.

[tim0901]

17 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Can they just rename it as Thunderbolt 5 or USB5? You know, simplify shopping for peripherals and not make consumers sound like a crazy person when buying.

Part of me really hopes they call it Thunderbolt 5 just as a massive fuck you to the USB-IF, although I doubt they will though given that Intel themselves are a member.

 

My guess is they'll call it Thunderbolt 4 2.0 for name parity with USB - which honestly I'd accept given the situation. As much as I'd like it to be called Thunderbolt 5 for simplicity, having two different numbers for the same thing is also fucking stupid. But I'd appreciate that consistency a lot more if the consistent name wasn't in and of itself complete bullshit.

[WhitetailAni]

10 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

My guess is they'll call it Thunderbolt 4 2.0 for name parity with USB - which honestly I'd accept given the situation. As much as I'd like it to be called Thunderbolt 5 for simplicity, having two different numbers for the same thing is also fucking stupid. But I'd appreciate that consistency a lot more if the consistent name wasn't in and of itself complete bullshit.

I doubt they'll call it Thunderbolt 5 since it's not really a new spec, just two TB4 connections over 1 cable.

[tim0901]

13 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

I doubt they'll call it Thunderbolt 5 since it's not really a new spec, just two TB4 connections over 1 cable.

But does that fact matter to literally anyone? Not in the slightest. Therefore it shouldn't be a factor in the naming scheme. Just call it Thunderbolt 5. 5 is bigger and better than 4 - it's so simple anyone can understand it.

 

Also, Thunderbolt 4 was just Thunderbolt 3 with the optional bits of the standard made non-optional. It was hardly a new spec either.

[TrigrH]

1 hour ago, BachChain said:

My thoughts

I would suggest Thunderbolt 4.1 Gen2.1 2x2 V2.0

Hmm seems a little short.

 

lets go with:

 

USB type - C superspeed ultraspeed highspeed Thunderbolt 4.10 Gen 2.1 2x2 Version 2.0 80gbps 240w PD.3.0

 

Then add a billion logos on the port for thunderbolt, charging spec, speed, displayport etc.

[Techstorm970]

2 hours ago, TrigrH said:

Hmm seems a little short.

 

lets go with:

 

USB type - C superspeed ultraspeed highspeed Thunderbolt 4.10 Gen 2.1 2x2 Version 2.0 80gbps 240w PD.3.0

 

Then add a billion logos on the port for thunderbolt, charging spec, speed, displayport etc.

Precisely!  Let's go full 2007 on this bitch!

[DrMacintosh]

How many PCIe lanes would this new standard have? If the current system gives you 4 lanes, would this next standard double that to 8? That's pretty huge if that's how it works out. 

[Obioban]

Given that so far thunderbolt naming convention has been... 

Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt 2

Thunderbolt 3

Thunderbolt 4

 

... I think there's reasonably good odds of the next version being called "Thunderbolt 5". 

 

Not everyone has to be stupid, just because USB is a never ending clusterfuck. 

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Obioban said:

Not everyone has to be stupid, just because USB is a never ending clusterfuck. 

USB isn't a clusterfuck either. It's just that people for some reason refuse to use the official names that are very easy to understand.

 

• USB4 20Gbps is the name of the 20Gbps connection.
• USB4 40Gbps is the name of the 40Gbps connection.
• "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps" is the name of the USB 3.X spec that supports 10Gbps.
• "SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps" is the name of a USB 3.X port that supports 20Gbps.

and so on and so forth.

 

 

Everyone complaining about USB's naming schemes and then uses the internal specification names rather than the marketing names reminds me of this comic:

 

 

Just call the ports by their official names and this won't be a problem.

 

I also feel like people don't really want the naming to get fixed, because they have so much fun repeating the same "lol USB naming is confusing" joke over and over. Because as we all know, jokes gets funnier and funnier the more times you repeat them...

[Curufinwe_wins]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

USB isn't a clusterfuck either. It's just that people for some reason refuse to use the official names that are very easy to understand.

 

• USB4 20Gbps is the name of the 20Gbps connection.
• USB4 40Gbps is the name of the 40Gbps connection.
• "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps" is the name of the USB 3.X spec that supports 10Gbps.
• "SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps" is the name of a USB 3.X port that supports 20Gbps.

and so on and so forth.

 

 

Everyone complaining about USB's naming schemes and then uses the internal specification names rather than the marketing names reminds me of this comic:

 

 

Just call the ports by their official names and this won't be a problem.

 

I also feel like people don't really want the naming to get fixed, because they have so much fun repeating the same "lol USB naming is confusing" joke over and over. Because as we all know, jokes gets funnier and funnier the more times you repeat them...

Those names are already a cluster... super speed represents the 3rd and 4th fastest. Then comes USB 2.0 (Hi-Speed), below that is the 1.x standards including Low Speed and Full Speed.

 

Now add ontop of all the rest the non-manditory bs names/labels. DP alt mode, usb audio, pd (with the 10 different labels) etc etc.

 

It's one of the worst controlled and named interface standards in history. End of story.

[Senzelian]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

- snip -

Let me ask you a question. What is the correct way of calling USB 2?

 

USB 480Mbps?

[LAwLz]

12 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Let me ask you a question. What is the correct way of calling USB 2?

 

USB 480Mbps?

High speed USB, but are we really going to go "this naming standard isn't consistent because 22 years ago they named it differently so therefore it is bad!"? 

 

USB 2.0 was released 22 years ago. That does not usutify refusing to learn and use the correct names for the more current standards that do have easy to understand names. 

[Senzelian]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

That does not usutify refusing to learn and use the correct names for the more current standards that do have easy to understand names. 

It's not a justification, but an explanation. The naming simply is a clustertuck, otherwise we wouldn't be here discussing it.

 

My justification for not using the new naming scheme is that I'm lazy just like everyone else here. Get used to it. 

[Sauron]

19 hours ago, LAwLz said:

USB isn't a clusterfuck either. It's just that people for some reason refuse to use the official names that are very easy to understand.

I think the problem aren't the names themselves but rather the inconsistency in feature set between devices... a few years ago you could buy a USB device and in virtually all cases you'd get the same USB 3 support and be fairly certain it would perform as expected on any recent machine. Now if you want a high bandwidth device you need to make sure both the device and your computer have the correct port and the correct feature set or you may not get the performance you expected just because there are so many coexisting standards that use the same physical port. This would be a problem even if they just named the standards sequentially and we had usb3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 coexisting at the same time.

 

Suppose you buy a high end dock using this standard - if your laptop only supports "regular" 40gbps thunderbolt 4 you'll only get half performance out of it, and it's an absolute crapshoot whether a given computer will support this, normal tb4 or even tb3 or no tb standard at all on its USB-C port and if you want to know you need to consult a technical manual because it's certainly not written anywhere near the port (whereas USB 3 was often color coded and had the ss label next to it). It's not an insurmountable problem but it is quite annoying. From this perspective it may have been preferable to hold off on updating the standard for some time and just come out with USB 4 + TB 4 this year at 40Gb/s and keep it at that for the next 5 or 10 years. That way you could have color coded USB 3 or USB 4 ports and immediately know what to expect from a device.

[Sorenson]

I wonder if this will make external GPUs more viable. 

[leadeater]

17 hours ago, Sauron said:

-snip-

USB and now TB both suffering from "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Very few of these supplemental, optional and even non-optional, updates were needed or at least not in those short time frames.

 

Progress is good, badly planned snowballing progress is bad. We have standards to address consistency requirements and desires, we do not have standards for the sake of standards, oft forgotten purpose of their existence. People might say they want bigger, better, faster and as soon as possible but in reality they want stability and ease of use and understanding foremost.

 

I still prefer the old laptop docks with the proprietary port that you place the laptop down on it and slid the latching mechanism over a TB cable dock, one because cables are awful in comparison and two because you knew exactly what the capabilities of the dock were and it would work perfectly always for every feature and function supported by the laptop.

 

I think it's completely pathetic that Dell/HP/Lenovo sell different models of TB docks for their laptops that have different capabilities and feature support and people in general simply will not realize nor understand until it's too late and something does not work.

 

"Oh you wanted two 4k monitors, well too bad you got the $100 TB dock not the $150 dock"

"Oh you wanted 4k and 10Gbps Ethernet, should have got that $150 one", "Well yea the $100 does support 4k and 10Gbps but not at the same time, we did not make that clear enough?"

 

All or nothing development might stifle progress a bit but it damn well keeps our sanity.