With the news that Apple will drop Intel, does it mean the end of Thunderbolt ?
Thunderbolt is part of Intel Chipsets.
Thunderbolt is part of Intel Chipsets.
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The end of Thunderbolt ?
- Thread starter Serge88
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Thunderbolt is part of the USB4 spec. It will not require Intel chips.
en.wikipedia.org
USB4 - Wikipedia
Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C4 are sort of the same. On a legal level they aren’t but technically they are. But even that aside, Intel does allow using Thunderbolt chips on non-Intel chipsets, so you can have Thunderbolt without having the Intel chipset as well. So come Thunderbolt 4 it’s still possible to get it.
They could have dropped it while using Intel too since adding it was always optional, I fail to see your point.
As someone who watched my $2000 PowerPC Mac Pro basically become useless (for the reasons I purchased it) a couple years after I bought it the last time they switched processors, I think the end of Thunderbolt is the least of our worries.
As soon as software makers have to start supporting the new chip, they will quickly stop supporting the old chips, which will make all of our mac minis a lot less useful.
Oh I know! They will continue to support both for a long time! I remember hearing that nonsense last time.
Definitely glad I didnt buy one of those Mac Pros.
As soon as software makers have to start supporting the new chip, they will quickly stop supporting the old chips, which will make all of our mac minis a lot less useful.
Oh I know! They will continue to support both for a long time! I remember hearing that nonsense last time.
Definitely glad I didnt buy one of those Mac Pros.
USB 4 won't be available until 2022. Also, Intel said TB3 or TB4 will have more supports than USB4.
It seems the connectivity performance will be better than TB3 based on what Intel said such as eGPU.
I beg to disagree! Existing software won’t vanish over night and support for the existing hardware platform won’t cease right after a new hardware is announced or introduced.
A port or rewrite of software, on the other hand, takes quite some time until it gets close to the maturity state it has on the existing hardware platform (and that is not even taking into account the unavoidable toothing problems of a new hardware platform). Ask veterans for their experiences with then-new PPC or Intel Macs.
I think we are talking about several years until Apple can finish a transition of the whole Mac portfolio. During that Transition time, we’ll probably see fat binaries again, which were well supported in XCode and made it easy for developers to support two distinct hardware architectures (at least that’s what I heard and read).
We actually still have them. While not "as fat" as the binaries that supported both PPC and x86, if you inspect a lot of binaries on for Mac they still have two executables, one for x86_64 and one for x86 (32 bit). Of course Apple's move to Catalina and 64-bit only made the 32 bit portion redundant, but a lot of binaries has it. Not Apple's own mostly but yeah.
I mean, it's exactly what happened 13 years ago. I got the PowerPC Mac Pro 6 months before they made the announcement, and the Avid software I purchased it for stopped providing me updates 2 years later.
All existing software won't vanish overnight but new versions will be made that only support the new ARM processors and if they do support Intel they will make emulator versions that run very slow on Intel. Nobody is going to write new software for a deprecated chipset and Apple won't mind because that means more people buy new computers to support the stuff they want to do.
If you buy a new Apple computer after the announcement in a couple weeks, you are a sucker, or just have money to burn.
Or maybe some people have an immediate need and satisfy it. There’s always something better around the corner.
Never quite made sense to me.
The IIcx had a 16Mhz 030
The IIci had a 25Mhz 030
(My family had a IIsi-- a used IIsi at that. Nice machine, tho.)
So one might expect the IIvi to be faster than a IIvx....
I have to call shenanigans here. Even if you bought the last Power Mac G5 which was introduced some five months after the initial announcement of the Intel transition, you'd have still had a good four years, FROM THAT POINT, of the ability to run the latest OS. And there's no way a company like Avid would've ditched PowerPC even as early as the release of Snow Leopard (they're quite terrible at keeping their things compatible with what's new). Let's say you got the first Power Mac G5 some two years before that, you'd have had six years total before the OS released kicked you out (and I'm sure you would've still had another two to three years thereafter; 10 years on a $2000 computer is incredible circa that decade, Pro workstation or not).
USB 4 is Intel's master plan for Thunderbolt. With USB 4, Thunderbolt 3 is effectively able to be integrated into anything; not just Intel-based platforms.
I mean the anger and rage is still seared in my memory. I did not log every date that stuff stopped being supported because I replaced it with a PC soon after, but the last OS that was supported was released in 2009 on a computer that was considered top of the line when i bought it.
Maybe that is acceptable to you, but I imagine many Mac Mini owners here would be pissed if you told them next years version of the OS would be the last OSX upgrade their 2018 Mac minis would ever get.
As far as Avid, Here is a link to the Avid forum from 2008 that mentions a new codec that wasn't going to be supported on PowerPC, that was just a couple years later. Software makers moved on quickly and they will this time too.
I jumped back to Apple and bought a Mac Pro 2009 for $500 in 2014 and got more life out of it than I did with my PowerPC G5 that I paid full price for.
Again though, tell me what really happened.
Interesting. My experience was a bit different, no doubt because of the software I used (photo processing and astronomy related). I had a PowerMac Dual G5 and used it until I replaced it with a 2010 MacPro. During that time I also used a PowerMac G3 as my music server.
I retired the MacPro last December, replacing it with the 2018 Mac Mini. And despite some issues, solutions documented elsewhere on the the forums, I've been happy so far.
And before that I had a Quadra 700, which was eventually replaced by that PowerMac G3. The Quadra replaced a 512 KE (that I 'upgraded' to a SE30). I still have that 512 KE, and it still boots (at least it did last time I tried ...).
And back then when things weren't supported, they still worked, which is why I could use older versions on that G3. With today's infatuation with subscriptions, things might be different. But I bought my Mini expecting to get years of use. And even with a possible (likely) change to ARM processors, my expectations have not changed.
And while the Intel change was a surprise, the potential ARM change has been rumored for some time now. And people can take that into account when making their decision.
Of course, your, and everyone's, mileage will vary.
TBF I don't necessarily expect Apple to never make a change so as not to upset the existing ecosystem, but if you are looking to buy, especially at the higher end of the spectrum with money that isn't your bosses, I would think long and hard about that and at least wait until after next weeks announcement because you could get burned very badly.
I just bought my wife a mac mini and my daughter the new macbook air and am thinking about returning both while I still have a window to do so.
Thunderbolt is part of the USB4 spec. It will not require Intel chips.
USB4 - Wikipedia
TB is an optional part of the USB4 spec, and all TB devices still require Intel certification. So far (someone correct me if I'm wrong) there are 0 ARM-based devices that are TB certified, and only 2 non-Intel motherboards for AMD that are TB certified. So right now examples non-Intel TB devices are slim-pickings.
[automerge]1591996573[/automerge]
Not that I know of, and only 2 AMD motherboards.
[automerge]1591996783[/automerge]
This might be too pedantic, but that's not correct. USB is a set specifications that contain include a number of protocols among other things. Supporting some protocols is mandatory, but some are optional. Thunderbolt is one of many protocols and it's optional.
Intel needed to make Thunderbolt royalty-free to get it included in USB-IF. But Intel still maintains a grip on Thunderbolt by requiring Intel certification for all Thunderbolt devices. So far, that certification is not as freely given as people might like. I think if Apple releases an ARM Mac with Thunderbolt, it will be the first major OEM to release a non-Intel Thunderbolt product.
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Again, I can see this being annoying if you bought your top of the line G5 following the transition announcement. But even then, we're talking four years. You add another year on top of that, and it becomes impossible to order replacement parts for that thing outside of the state of California and the nation of Turkey.
It would never go down like that. Even if Apple did the transition in the exact same length of time, someone who bought a 2018 Mac mini in 2018 would have two years, plus another four on top of that. Six years. Apple never made it comfortable to be using six year old Mac minis at any point in time (with maybe the exception of the 2012 Quad-Core Mac minis configured with an SSD). Don't forget that Apple in 2007 was prohibiting most 4 year old G4 systems from even running Mac OS X Leopard. If anything, they've gotten better at letting older systems stay in the loop. Not worse.
That's not an Avid codec. That's a Microsoft codec. And that more reeks of "we never had a plan to release a PPC version of this; we're releasing an x86 Mac version because it's easier to port to the same architecture". This was common of a lot of software back then (and was highlighted as one of the benefits of moving to x86 to begin with).
You can run the current macOS on eight year old hardware. In 2005 or whenever you bought your PowerPC Mac, that was never true.
Some dude on the Internet got angry at Apple for giving him notice that his top of the line computer wasn't special anymore and he decided to get pissy about it?
I'm not saying I agree with Apple's pracitces here, man. I'm saying that, even with the worst case scenario being not great, it was still fairly par for the course back then.
The first Mac mini with Apple Bionics chip won't include Thunderbolt 3, only USB.