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Apple's Arm-Based Macs With Apple Silicon Chips Will Support Thunderbolt

johngwheeler said:
Yes, but Intel is the licence holder, and could, in theory at least, have withheld the use of the licence to Apple.
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In theory, sure.

In practice, Apple legal most likely already has negotiated a worldwide, perpetual license of some sort or at least one that protects their ability to use it for future products for quite a while to come.

Also, in practice, Intel would be foolish to even sue over something petty. Apple has, what 10% marketshare of PCs? What are they going to accomplish by not letting Apple use the tech? They're a corporation like any other, if licensing tech brings them more cash, they do it.

Apple uses/bought out Intel modems in iPhones. Dropping their chips is water under the bridge.
 
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Zen_Arcade said:
Good news but hardly surprising.
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I don’t know, if you browsed some of the message boards here, there quite a few who were pretty confident we had seen the last of Thunderbolt for any number of reasons.
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johngwheeler said:
Yes, but Intel is the licence holder, and could, in theory at least, have withheld the use of the licence to Apple.

I have read that USB-C *can* include Thunderbolt-3 without a licence, but that TB3 support is one of the optional items in the USB4 standard.
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Have you seen the development agreement between Apple and Intel? You have no idea what rights it granted to Apple.
 
thingstoponder said:
I expected this despite all the doom and gloomers. Still nice that Apple game out ahead of this And didn’t let it linger. Now please announce Apple Silicon Macs won’t be limited to their own GPUs. Plenty of people are saying this like it’s a fact and it’s obvious nonsense to me.
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Why is it nonsense? If it is faster and more power efficient than the alternatives, then it makes perfect sense.
 
thingstoponder said:
I expected this despite all the doom and gloomers. Still nice that Apple game out ahead of this And didn’t let it linger. Now please announce Apple Silicon Macs won’t be limited to their own GPUs. Plenty of people are saying this like it’s a fact and it’s obvious nonsense to me.
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Amen. With confirmed TB support it would be especially silly if they didnt support eGPUs at least.
 
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masterleep said:
Now let's hope they get rid of the awful Touch Bar.
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I'd rather have the Touch Bar than not; I doubt most people touch-type function keys anyway, and the Touch Bar is certainly more versatile than physical keys. (And no, the LAST thing I'd want is a full-on touchscreen on a laptop.)

If you want to easily make the Touch Bar do more, install BetterTouchTool and play around with it a bit.
 
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And here I thought that the whole significance to USB4 (especially as far as Apple's plans to switch away from Intel) was that it allowed all of the benefits and interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 minus all of Intel's red tape.

Then again, if we're starting to see AMD motherboards that have support for Thunderbolt, there's no reason why we can't see it on Apple's end.

The thing I'm curious about though is where the Thunderbolt controller will live. Will it be in Apple's SoC? Will it be a separate chip on the logic board. Will that chip be made by Intel? Or will it be made by Apple? Will the iPad Pros move up from USB to Thunderbolt on their USB-C connectors? So many questions now!
 
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groove-agent said:
I enjoyed the Touch Bar after installing Better Touch Tool but overall, I hardly use it except when I accidentally hit the Siri button when touch-typing the delete key. At this point I'd rather have the old function keys back.
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I wish I had an ounce of gold for every time I accidentally hit the Touch Bar Siri. I'm like you though, it's there, but I seldom remember to use. It's just not ergonomically convenient, and I'd rather see technology that is.
 
thingstoponder said:
I expected this despite all the doom and gloomers. Still nice that Apple game out ahead of this And didn’t let it linger. Now please announce Apple Silicon Macs won’t be limited to their own GPUs. Plenty of people are saying this like it’s a fact and it’s obvious nonsense to me.
Click to expand...
I’m going to venture a guess that the first one out of the gate will be a laptop that does rely on just the internal GPU, so they can get that completely worked out, and then start adding on discrete GPU support. So, maybe a MacBook Air, or MacBook (“MacBook nothing” as some call it). With MBP-level CPU performance, and huge battery life - since the latter is something an ARM laptop is uniquely suited to pull off, it’d make a good flex. “Just as fast, for twice as long”, or something like that. It’ll also let them point out the very good Metal performance of their own GPUs. Then, once that’s established, and they’ve had some more development time, we’ll get discrete GPUs.
 
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Can't believe some people thought it wouldn't. They helped create the spec and are still involved. They'll keep utilizing it even after making the switch. There was never any doubt about that.
 
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R3k said:
Really? I was looking forward to a whole new proprietary standard and a ******** of dongles to go with it. Oh well. Next time.
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I was expecting more of a speed boost. It just has more bandwidth than USB4?

So...for eGPUs it's no better? Does it take advantage of PCIE4? Or able to drive 8k monitors?

Azrael.
 
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MyopicPaideia said:
Well it will be USB4 with full TB3 compliance, not TB4. TB4 certification requires VT-d DMA protection, which is an Intel CPU only feature, so not going to be on an Apple Silicon Mac, that’s for sure.
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No it's not an Intel only feature. The Controllers being released 6 months after Tiger Like will be available to all. Intel is integrating the controller into their CPU architecture thus forgoing to need for extra on-board controller chips.
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Azrael9 said:
I was expecting more of a speed boost. It just has more bandwidth than USB4?

So...for eGPUs it's no better? Does it take advantage of PCIE4? Or able to drive 8k monitors?

Azrael.
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More bandwidth, considerably lower latency.
 
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Azrael9 said:
I was expecting more of a speed boost. It just has more bandwidth than USB4?

So...for eGPUs it's no better? Does it take advantage of PCIE4? Or able to drive 8k monitors?

Azrael.
Click to expand...

I suspect it will have intelligent bandwidth allocation than TB3, meaning that at a minimum there will be 32Gbps available for EGPU PCIe data (rather than the current practical limitation of 22Gbps due to the permanently reserved 10 Gbps for DisplayPort signal).
 
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thingstoponder said:
Now please announce Apple Silicon Macs won’t be limited to their own GPUs. Plenty of people are saying this like it’s a fact and it’s obvious nonsense to me.
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Soon enough macOS will only support Metal when it comes to graphics APIs and considering how optimized Apple Silicon is (and will be) for Metal, non-Apple GPUs may very well not be competitive.


BornAgainMac said:
I wonder what the extra cost will be to keep it vs USB 4.
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This being Apple, there would be no end-user cost savings of having USB4-only vs USB4+TB4 so might as well get both.
 
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Westside guy said:
The TouchBar can't do anything a touch screen wouldn't do as well or better.

But Jobs made a big deal about how bad touch screens were and how they required "gorilla arms", so people are stuck with this silly "pretend I'm not really a tiny one-line touch screen".
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Well, it gives you a ton of extra space on the scree you do have. For example, I access my Dock on the Touch Bar by holding down a modifier key, which means I never have to devote screen space to it.

That said, I think Apple should do touch screens as well. Regardless of Jobs' concern (legitimate, at that time), no one would use the touch screen as their primary interface. It would be nice to have the ability to use touch when needed, though.
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fbr$ said:
Problem is not the Touch Bar, but the lack of a function keys row, it should have both at same time.
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Why? I think the point was to add functionality to keys that were relatively infrequently used by most people.
 
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Onelifenofear said:
I love it. Use it all the time. Admittedly I have some awesome setup for apps with Better Touch Tool.

it's interesting that some people hate on this... just because it doesn't fit their needs or they can't be bothered to find out what it can do....

That said I would love for apple to have an OLED keyboard like the Optimus Maximus. Completely customisable for every app. shows tools images into photo shop for example.
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I never look at the keyboard.
So for me it is a complete waste. And when I do want to change things like the volume, I have to look away from the screen.
I much prefer keys and find using a external keyboard a better experience than using the keyboard with Touch Bar.
At least now I have a physical escape key...
 
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