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M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

eclecticlight.co

241–250 of 333 posts

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#241
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My M1 Mini is the best computer I've ever owned, bar none. Most of that junk you are whining about is irrelevant niche stuff. Nobody GAF if they can replace the internal SSD, or if there's any difference between replacing the SSD and replacing the entire motherboard. It has two USB ports, two USB-C/TB3 ports, HDMI, ethernet, bluetooth, wifi, and a headphone barrel jack, like any other computer. WTF are dongles?

I think the guy was just trolling. Esp that TLB stuff thats quite speculative and if true means memory hopping, write heavy, gpu bound apps can't squeeze all of the fastest, niche version of m1 ultra. I mean, thats just ridiculous. Its obvious to any programmer that squeezing all from a processor requires optimizations, usually for rapidly diminishing returns. My m1 max laptop is so good that if it broke today, I'd l…

If you've hung around some of the previous M1 threads, I really don't think he is trolling. That's actually how some people feel about it.

I gotta say it's been really wild watching "epistemic closure" in action. There are clearly two different sets of facts and two different realities based on them that have emerged at this point, one where M1 is slower than x86 and requires everything to be emulated and USB doesn't work and you can't use external displays and it's a closed and locked-down system that is NEVER going to get a linux port, and one where it's got massive IPC and great battery life/etc and everything basically Just Works and the linux people are thundering along and have a basically workable system. People are living in like totally different worlds, one where it's just more apple trash and one where it's the best thing since sliced bread and actually better than the x86 alternatives.

I dunno if it's people who just haven't used it, or people who are ideologically opposed to apple's designs, or just super hate macos, or what, but even in the benchmark space it's become completely bimodal, you've got Anandtech where it's showing up to 3.5x the IPC at 0.7x the clock of competing designs in SPEC cpu benchmarks suites, and you've got Hardware Unboxed where it barely edges out current designs at iso-power even in ARM-native builds of Cinebench.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM&t=726

tbh I've been thinking something similar in general - the synthetic stuff seems amazing, but it does seem like it has some problem actually putting power to the ground in real applications. Cinebench is native, so that shouldn't be a factor, and it should be something that makes great use of that absolutely wild FP32 IPC, so why isn't Apple running away with it anywhere near as much as SPEC shows it should? There's something weird there and I can't quite puzzle it out.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#242
post #241
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the guy was just trolling. Esp that TLB stuff thats quite speculative and if true means memory hopping, write heavy, gpu bound apps can't squeeze all of the fastest, niche version of m1 ultra. I mean, thats just ridiculous. Its obvious to any programmer that squeezing all from a processor requires optimizations, usually for rapidly diminishing returns. My m1 max laptop is so good that if it broke today, I'd l…

If you've hung around some of the previous M1 threads, I really don't think he is trolling. That's actually how some people feel about it. I gotta say it's been really wild watching "epistemic closure" in action. There are clearly two different sets of facts and two different realities based on them that have emerged at this point, one where M1 is slower than x86 and requires everything to be emulated and USB doesn't…

I don't think those final two things are necessarily contradictory. It's very possible to have high theoretical IPC that applications cannot exploit.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#243
post #99
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers.

> I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers. No, it's specifically to give marketers what they want, which is the ability to advertise support for the latest version of the spec without actually having to improve the product. It's not USB-IF's marketers that want this, it's the vendors who pay USB-IF whose marketers want this.

Because being able to differentiate uniquely different offerings by different designations is only of value to marketers?

There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#244
post #226
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s gotta be some lobbying or consulting firm hired by manufacturers that’s using the same strategy between the two standards. The consortiums don’t seem to realize that short-term profits are coming at their expense of their brand.

Why would it come at the expense of long-term profits? The EU has given a legal mandate to USB-IF, you literally are not legally allowed to use anyone else's connection standards. What "profit loss" could possibly occur under a literal government-mandated monopoly requirement? Display standards aren't quite there yet but HDMI is effectively a monopoly in the living-room space and most people use them for mass-market…

My belief is that more individuals would be seeking out Thunderbolt accessories over USB.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#245
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a "MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)" and I clearly can't have 2 external monitors. I tried everything.

That model has built-in support for a single external display in addition to the built-in display. If you want a second external display, you have to use third-party DisplayLink technology, which may be good enough depending upon your use case, but is inferior to built-in support.

Parent poster could also connect additional displays:

- via Sidecar on an iPad - via Airplay on a display of their choosing

Just mentioning workarounds, not excusing things.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#246
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as seen with the limit on external screens on some M1 models (…) I hope Apple fixes these issues soon It’s only the base M1 used in the low-end devices that has limited support for external screens. A MBPro with M1 Max can drive 3x6k (DP1.4) plus 1x4k(HDMI2.0). That seems like more than enough for a laptop. Sounds to me like these issues have already been fixed.

How can you call a 2000$ mb pro or a 1700 imac low end devices?

Mac Mini is under $1000 and it’s the same chip.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#247
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the Mac M1 mini $699?

Did you just compare the $700 Mini to a $140 ECS Liva or some $200 HP or Asus Chromebox?

If you think either of those computers holds a candle to an M1 Mac mini I don’t know what to tell you.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#248
post #244
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it come at the expense of long-term profits? The EU has given a legal mandate to USB-IF, you literally are not legally allowed to use anyone else's connection standards. What "profit loss" could possibly occur under a literal government-mandated monopoly requirement? Display standards aren't quite there yet but HDMI is effectively a monopoly in the living-room space and most people use them for mass-market…

My belief is that more individuals would be seeking out Thunderbolt accessories over USB.

[deleted]

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just compare the $700 Mini to a $140 ECS Liva or some $200 HP or Asus Chromebox?

ECS Liva has 4GB RAM and 32GB of storage with Windows 10. It is going to be extremely limited in what it can do. In that case the iPad at $329 becomes a legitimate competitor and it includes a screen.

The current version of the Liva has a bit more generous specs, at up to 8 GB of RAM and up to 128 GB of internal storage. A Raspberry Pi (if you can find one) or one of the Rockchip SBCs could also be a low-end desktop. I think the point is made, though, that when I mention the true low end of desktop machines the Mac Mini is not even part of the same conversation.

https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/LIVA/LIVA_Q3_Plus/specific...

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the version of the standard is conflated with the version of the port. Here is a better system: 1) The standard has a version number. I would have suggested semver, except that USB will always be backwards compatible within the same physical port, so there's no need for separate major/minor versions. We can just use an incrementing number 1,2,3 etc. 2) The standard gives each physical port layout…

I think you just recreated what the USB Forum is already doing? The standard as a whole has a version number that increments with the entire standard document. Port layouts are named A, B, C (and deprecated Micro-A, Micro-B, and Mini-A). The transfer rates are now named: Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 1x2, and Gen 2x2. (These names are stupid, but they are names. Gen 1 is all the transport capabilities from USB 1.0 to USB 3.0 {in…

> I think you just recreated what the USB Forum is already doing?

If they were doing this then there wouldn't be any ports described as "USB 3.1" (see point 4). The version of the standard is not just irrelevant but actively misleading to use in marketing material.

> Marking the port type is redundant because USB has been good about giving every port type a very different physical silhouette.

On the port itself, sure, but if I'm buying a laptop online then it's pretty important what type of port it has, so saying "USB C T2" is a lot more useful than just "USB T2". How would I even know what silhuette the port has?

The two most important pieces of information are the type of port and the transfer speed. There are only a small number of possibilities for each, and the latter is a purely numeric value, so a letter/number pair is sufficient.

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