191–200 of 279 posts
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Copper thunderbolt limit is 3 m. Optical thunderbolt can go much farther (naturally) but I've never seen it in the wild -- it might even have been abandoned by now.
But you can't charge a laptop with an optical cable. As for copper, I understand you don't get 40gbps with a 3m cable (though not a specialist).
Royalty free is the huge boon here.
Intel said that a couple of years ago, and yet you won't find an AMD laptop/desktop that supports thunderbolt.
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I feel like hand-wringing around that is a bit overexaggerated - at the end of the day the differences really matter for only really tiny subset of devices that need those 10GBit+ transfers and in that case you can guide yourself by the "SuperSpeed 10Gbit" "Superspeed 20Gbit" logos on the actual box. For everything else the protocols are forward and backward compatible, so you just plug in the cable and it works.
So remind me, why can you walk into any apple store, pick up a new MacBook and a 5K LG monitor, and when you plug in the monitor using the USB-C cable that was bundled with the MacBook it just won't work at all? My point is - the standards might be back and forward compatible. But the cables and ports definitely aren't - and your average consumer has absolutely no way of knowing. They look absolutely identical on the…
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So remind me, why can you walk into any apple store, pick up a new MacBook and a 5K LG monitor, and when you plug in the monitor using the USB-C cable that was bundled with the MacBook it just won't work at all? My point is - the standards might be back and forward compatible. But the cables and ports definitely aren't - and your average consumer has absolutely no way of knowing. They look absolutely identical on the…
A lot (most?) charge cables are USB 2.0 — just enough data to negotiate the higher power. If they supported faster data too, they'd be more expensive. But it definitely should be more clear! Apple's minimalism doesn't help in this case, either.
Apple don't make a "USB-C data" cable - they make a USB-C charge cable, or a TB3 cable, and the TB3 one has the thunderbolt logo on each end.
They also refer to it specifically as "USB-C Charge Cable", everywhere.
What's optional? That's the most important thing to know is what's optional in the spec. That could make it great or a major pain. I'm referring to how many features the specification defines as "optional" for manufactures and that the USB organization requires for logos. This is why even USB-C is a nightmare. Consider a USB-C cable or device port. It could be charge only, data only, monitor support. There are even m…
Everything is optional. USB-IF is for manufacturers, most of whom want to do whatever the cheapest quickest thing is. The user experience absolutely comes second to manufacturing cost and marking convenience. The naming confusion exists because cheap manufacturers don't want to be branded as the "lesser" product or be offering a "lesser" computer. The confusion aids them. They can ship a slightly cheaper computer or…
So you're left with a choice in this wonderful alternative non-optional world: some expensive temperature controlled oscillator with accompanying nuclear power plant integrated into every mouse, with a dual core processor just in case the host wishes to speak mouse-over-Thunderbolt, with a 240V connector on the mouse just in case the host wants to charge from it, or mice living on a separate low throughput bus where such requirements don't exist. We had that already, it was called the 1970s-1990s, it was an even bigger mess than what we have now, and is exactly what USB's mandate is to avoid
It's not like this is a new problem to USB, it's been a tri-modal specification from the outset to cope with completely different requirements of the peripherals that were to be unified, these horrible recent complexity outcomes are just a natural extension from the early days.
It wasn't so long ago that every budget peripheral manufacturer outside of e.g. printers and mice were forced to bundle expansion cards to implement custom busses just so you could talk to their e.g. scanner. This was still the reality of things as late as 1995 or so. Here we didn't just have custom connectors on the back of the machine, but custom cards that had to be installed to implement those connectors. In the 24 years since 1995, outside of display interfaces I count only 2 major new busses to date -- Firewire and USB. That sounds like a success to me
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Why is that? You can't do that from looking at a file with an unknown extension. Physical connector technology and signaling protocol are entirely different things. I'd be fine with literally everything using the same physical connector, but knowing that I can't and shouldn't plug my 5VDC battery-charger into a 110VAC outlet. I still have speakers that are connected by stripping a lampcord pair with my teeth, pushing…
Pick any random USB-C cable. Can you tell by looking at it what speeds it supports? Is it USB-3 or USB-2? How about the power delivery aspect, how much power is it cable of transferring? You might be able to tell some of those things from modern cables, if they're bragging about a speed factor, but otherwise it isn't clear.
As someone who knows next to nothing about how USB actually works and just uses it, what goes into making each USB generation faster? At the physical layer, is it the materials in the cables are getting better? Or new ways of using the same materials? At the protocol layer, is it newly developed computer science theory being applied or is it just old fashioned pragmatic engineering iteration, looking at usage and mak…
Each successive frequency increase has required more complex PHY design.
On the digital side : more sophisticated bit encoding schemes
On the analog side : tighter tolerances for clocking and signal jitter, more sophisticated transmitter and receiver technology (better emphasis/deemphasis, better equalization)
Here's taste of the PHY changes : https://www.chipestimate.com/Type-C-USB31-PHY-Challenges-in-...
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Corning has several lengths of optical thunderbolt 2 cable, do you need it to be thunderbolt 3 specifically?
This is for 5K and docking station specifically.
It's really disappointing that Display Stream Compression hasn't been built into everything for the last 5+ years, and is only now barely getting into equipment. 2:1 or 3:1 compressed display data looks fine, and being able to add more pixels or bit depth or refresh rate far more than makes up for the tiny losses. Without it, tons of screens are stuck at significantly reduced framerates or 4:2:0 subsampling.
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A lot (most?) charge cables are USB 2.0 — just enough data to negotiate the higher power. If they supported faster data too, they'd be more expensive. But it definitely should be more clear! Apple's minimalism doesn't help in this case, either.
> Apple's minimalism doesn't help in this case, either. Apple don't make a "USB-C data" cable - they make a USB-C charge cable, or a TB3 cable, and the TB3 one has the thunderbolt logo on each end. They also refer to it specifically as "USB-C Charge Cable", everywhere .
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This is for 5K and docking station specifically.
Ah, so just barely more than thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.2 can handle at 60Hz. It's really disappointing that Display Stream Compression hasn't been built into everything for the last 5+ years, and is only now barely getting into equipment. 2:1 or 3:1 compressed display data looks fine, and being able to add more pixels or bit depth or refresh rate far more than makes up for the tiny losses. Without it, tons of screens ar…