Thunderbolt To Be Offered As A Royalty-Free Industry Specification

[profoundWHALE]

<facepalms>

Thanks for reinventing the wheel. Fiber will never be as cheap as copper tho. Not even if you *combine* fiber with copper. Also, RJ45 won't just magically transmit data from fiber, you need to convert those light waves in some way. With something like... a transceiver. Invented a few decades ago. Costs at least $50 and you need 2 for every cable.

But yeah, your suggestion is awesome. Unless you take the 5 seconds that is needed to realize how dumb it actually is.

First off, I was speaking about the RJ45, TRRS, and XLR plugs separate from the cable technology. Durable, easy to service and easy to use (plug in and unplug) for even the simplest of end users.

And when I was speaking about fiber and copper, the reason why I said fiber for data is because of the technical limitations of data transmission with electricity.

Either way you seriously misunderstood me.

[kenjitamura]

Is a "Royalty-Free Industry Specification" different from an open standard? If I had to guess I'd say it is and the difference is that Intel maintains full control over the future development of it but I am entirely ignorant on such matters so I could be way off on that assumption.

[starshipeleven]

Yes, that is what I said in the next sentence after the part you quoted.

I'm sorry but I could't follow your reasoning there.

Thunderbolt is needed as upstream port, downstream devices can use whatever and I don't care as long as it is fast enough for their usage.

[starshipeleven]

Is a "Royalty-Free Industry Specification" different from an open standard? If I had to guess I'd say it is and the difference is that Intel maintains full control over the future development of it but I am entirely ignorant on such matters so I could be way off on that assumption.

It means that Intel keeps full control, but that everyone can implement it for free.

Many other things like usb or hdmi require you to be a member of consortium and pay a yearly fee and do other things.

An Open Standard isn't controlled by a single company but by the consortium of (industry) users.

[TheBlackCat]

And when I was speaking about fiber and copper, the reason why I said fiber for data is because of the technical limitations of data transmission with electricity.

That doesn't change the fundamental issue: that fiber, both the cable and the circuitry, is absurdly overpriced except for very specialized situations.

[TheBlackCat]

I'm sorry but I could't follow your reasoning there.

Thunderbolt is needed as upstream port, downstream devices can use whatever and I don't care as long as it is fast enough for their usage.

I am making a distinction between thunderbolt support on the computer side and thunderbolt usage in practice. Whether your computer has a thunderbolt port or not is academic if no devices you own support thunderbolt.

[starshipeleven]

I am making a distinction between thunderbolt support on the computer side and thunderbolt usage in practice. Whether your computer has a thunderbolt port or not is academic if no devices you own support thunderbolt.

I still don't understand what point are you trying to make.

I don't want my external hdd to support thunderbolt for lulz, I want my PC to have ports that allow the best expansion ability possible.

There are plenty of Thunderbolt devices already (mostly docking stations and quite a bit external pcie enclosures, stuff where actually having thunderbolt matters), the main issues were:

-only very few PCs had that port
-Thunderbolt 2 was a dedicated port (i.e. I couldn't just plug any usb device in it and assume it works)

Now that Intel is making it easier to make PCs with thunderbolt AND that it isn't anymore a dedicated port, the issues above are fixed.

[carewolf]

I still don't understand what point are you trying to make.

I don't want my external hdd to support thunderbolt for lulz, I want my PC to have ports that allow the best expansion ability possible.

There are plenty of Thunderbolt devices already (mostly docking stations and quite a bit external pcie enclosures, stuff where actually having thunderbolt matters), the main issues were:

-only very few PCs had that port
-Thunderbolt 2 was a dedicated port (i.e. I couldn't just plug any usb device in it and assume it works)

Now that Intel is making it easier to make PCs with thunderbolt AND that it isn't anymore a dedicated port, the issues above are fixed.

That just leaves the security issue of have an external PCIe port that can bypass encryption root you and dumb your data in less than a second.

[Mr.Elendig]

That doesn't change the fundamental issue: that fiber, both the cable and the circuitry, is absurdly overpriced except for very specialized situations.

YMMV. I've paid less for 4 fibre OM2 and OM3 than for solid copper cat6a, cca cat6a would of course be a different story. I can agree on the electronics side though.

[starshipeleven]

That just leaves the security issue of have an external PCIe port that can bypass encryption root you and dumb your data in less than a second.

This isn't 2008. Now we have IOMMU (VT-d) that sandboxes DMA.

there is a as kernel command line parameter that force enables it (I don't remember, maybe iommu=force, intel_iommu=on or amd_iommu=on) . This works fine on my laptop that (how unexpectedly) lacks that option in UEFI but supports that from cpu specs

I don't give a fuck about that on Windows systems, and neither do most Windows users.