Thunderbolt 6!

[theorist9]

Is that additional PCIe backhaul bandwidth for transported PCIe or for USB 3T?
Also is that a single port controller or two port? ( the picture in the dem room has ne backhaul link coming out of the chip and three other links coming out . Each link is of a different type so that could be representative of just the types or could be that this is a 2 ( or more ) controller . So 2-3 ports only suck up x4 PCIe )
The illustration is not suggestive of an actual PHY chips for a single port. That more so looks like a TB controller than a PHYS chip.

If selling this to Windows PC folks they probably not keen to give up x4 PCie lanes per port. X4 v5 lanes switched down into 2 x4 v4 worth of bandwidth. The rest of press release is about their advances in switch work. Could be the switch inside the TB controller is the tie in.

Those are good questions, and in looking over it in more detail, I was probably too optimistic. You are right to be skeptical.

It may be that all we can say today is that ASMedia is developing USB4 v2 controller chips, and is separately developing PCIe Gen5 bridge technology.

That's different from saying ASMedia is developing an 80 Gb/s USB4 v2 to PCIe 5.0 ×4 controller.

Did anyone get around to measuring the raw data throughput of Apple’s RDMA TB solution ?

I did some checking, and wasn't able to find a clean test.

 

[drrich2]

We already have 800-1600Gb connections in the networking world, its only a matter of time before it trickles down to consumer with thunderbolt.

Interesting! Had to Google to find out about that. Looks like A.I. data centers drive demand. Which raises the questions...how is this done, and at what cost? Wonder what the power consumption and heat generation look like?

We already have Cat. 8 ethernet cables that can handle 40 Gbps speeds, but what Mac or Windows PC in home use has a network card that can send and receive over 10 Gbps? 10 Gbps ethernet already has a rep. for substantial power consumption and heat generation, IIRC. It's expensive and yet has been available for many years.

But you said it's only a matter of time before it trickles down to consumers with Thunderbolt, not ethernet. Which again leaves me wondering what the future of high speed connections is - Thunderbolt or USB? Ethernet? Optical fiber?

 

[theorist9]

Much faster connections aren't that exotic. They're available on any workstation that accepts PCIe cards. For instance, the (now discontinued) M2 Mac Pro had two PCI-e 4.0 x16 slots, which would each give 16 x 16 Gb/s =256 Gb/s.

Newer workstations offer PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, which would each give 512 Gb/s. Threadripper PRO CPUs support 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, i.e., numerous x16 network cards.

Here's what a Threadripper Pro workstation from Boxx offers (https://boxx.com/systems/workstations/t-pro-class/apexx-t4pro-x). Though I don't know if the Threadripper Pro can support 512 Gb/s on each of those seven x16 cards simultaneously.

 

[theorist9]

I just thought of a reason Apple might not want the external SSDs on its consumer Macs to offer comparable access speed to its internal SSDs:

For users that want all their data on a single drive, and as a consequence would otherwise need a 4 TB or 8 TB internal SSD, a comparably fast external SSD could present a very compelling low-cost alternative.

I.e., extremely fast external SSDs could directly compete with Apple's lucrative storage upgrade pricing.

 

[throAU]

Interesting! Had to Google to find out about that. Looks like A.I. data centers drive demand. Which raises the questions...how is this done, and at what cost? Wonder what the power consumption and heat generation look like?

We already have Cat. 8 ethernet cables that can handle 40 Gbps speeds, but what Mac or Windows PC in home use has a network card that can send and receive over 10 Gbps? 10 Gbps ethernet already has a rep. for substantial power consumption and heat generation, IIRC. It's expensive and yet has been available for many years.

But you said it's only a matter of time before it trickles down to consumers with Thunderbolt, not ethernet. Which again leaves me wondering what the future of high speed connections is - Thunderbolt or USB? Ethernet? Optical fiber?

Fibre is required at those speeds. 10GbE networking is not expensive any more, most servers these days are 25/40 GbE ports. Consumer will catch up eventually. Right now I have an ex-server 2x 10GbE NIC in my home desktop.

and no, of course we aren't doing this over PCIe4.0 x4 slots 😀. By the time this (> 10GbE networking/p2p connections) reaches consumer/prosumer will probably be around the time of PCIe 6.0 or PCIe 7.0.

 

[maflynn]

.e., extremely fast external SSDs could directly compete with Apple's lucrative storage upgrade pricing.

I'm not sure its as lucrative as it used to be. People are buying less, and those that buy probably are under-speccing their machines because the price for more ram or storage is prohibitively high

I count myself lucky in that I bought my Studio last year, but even then I opt for the base model as getting one with 1TB was more then I was willing to pay. I picked up an external drive and its been a fantastic setup