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Thunderbolt To Be Offered As A Royalty-Free Industry Specification

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  • #31
    Always look a gift horse in the mouth. I bet thunderbolt 4 won't be royalty free.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by TheLexMachine View Post
      AMD's Ryzen is a good match for Apple, who already uses AMD GPUs in their products. Also, their upcoming Raven Ridge APUs would be perfect for iMac and Mac-mini refreshes that need extra power for 4K displays and high-resolution pictures and video. AMD's pro-grade APU with HBM would be a perfect fit for the high-end Mac-mini that would carry a 4K or 5K display with it. Intel simply has nothing in their GPU offerings that could work well enough in next-gen Apple products and their CPU offerings are just as impotent, when compared to what AMD has to offer.
      Not to mention the upcoming Zen server chips that (based on Ryzen benchmarks) will excel at the kinds of creative workloads the Mac Pro is used for. Like Ryzen, the Zen Server chips will likely undercut intel on price by quite a lot (which won't be hard, given the insane price of Xeon) which means better margins for Apple. See any recent Cinebench R15 results that include Ryzen, and you'll see Zen server chips are a perfect fit for Mac Pro.

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      • #33
        I suspect that Apple won't break up with their long-time best buddy Intel. If anything just because Thunderbolt does not work on AMD.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by anarki2 View Post
          Fiber will never be as cheap as copper tho.
          Glass Optical Fiber ? (GOF) Yeah, sure. It's an expensive medium, and requires expensive equipment to cut and crimp.

          Plastic Optical Fiber ? (POF) Nope. It is cheap.
          It's really easy to cut (you need a tool which is basically a nice rasor blade in a guillotine that makes it well aligned).
          You don't even need a connector, there are systems where you just directly plug the naked fiber in, a little bit reminiscent of HiFi speakers.
          It's even easier to wire up than RJ45.
          (Look up casacom they make giga bit over pof for the house or small enterprises).

          Classic plastic (as those sold by Casacom) used to be only transparent in the visible domain (red-light only) and work up to Gigabits range, at distances of dozens of meters.
          (They are similar to the fiber used for sound)
          Modern fibers (Perflurinated Graded Index) also transmit infra-red too and work in the 10s of Gigabits range, at distances of hundreds of meters.
          These cost about 2$ per-meter of duplex fiber.
          (The UPS delivery and import tax were literally the only barrier that prevented me to go for that higher quality fiber when I equipped the apartment - I stayed with the default one).


          That could be usable for thunderbolt, but :
          - would require a new type of connector (something like the optical audio 3mm jack connector : light goes in the middle of the jack, surface of jack is metallic and is used for power - instead of simply detection like in the audio application).
          - would require additional electronics (cheap VCSELaser diodes, chip to drive them) : probably adding 40 to 80$ per motherboard and per dock.
          - might require a way to tell orientation
          (if you use one fiber upstream and the other downstream. If the VCSEL operate in infrared, you can't tell simply by looking)
          (or if you use 2 wavelenght 850nm in one direction and 1300nm the other, like lots of modern fiber ISP - except they use 1300nm and 1500nm because long distance.)
          (or you could a duplex fiber, with each endpoint emitting 850nm in one, 1300nm in the other, and listenning opposite).

          - thus you can't reuse existing connectors like USB3 or Display Port.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by anarki2 View Post

            <facepalms>

            Fiber will never be as cheap as copper tho.
            Let’s see ...

            Copper -- refined from mineral dug out of the ground, finite resource, price keeps going up. (Cf ongoing plagues of cable thefts.)

            Fibre -- made from glass, which in turn is made from sand. What are the world reserves of sand like these days?

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            • #36
              Originally posted by kenjitamura View Post
              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.
              You are right, and this is also why no other silicon manufacturer in their right mind would jump on this "offer".
              Intel has the final say in the spec, and if they decide tomorrow to release TB4 which isn't backwards compatible except with Intel TB3 devices (for example Intel TB3 chips implement some extra functions which are not part of the TB3 spec, but are required for TB4), then you are SOL. There is nothing preventing Intel from pulling an embrace, extend & extinguish, and given the company history this doesn't seem totally preposterous to expect.

              Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
              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
              This requires that IOMMU is active at the time of the attack, works correctly, and that the operating system has configured it correctly. Neither was given for older implementations.

              DMA-based attacks against Thunderbolt usually used early boot situations, or resume from suspend, when no operating system would watch over DMA.

              Interestingly, in Thunderbolt 3, Intel has put additional mitigations in place (and a "legacy mode" to restore old behavior for compatibility, or for booting from TB devices), so the default configuration is now more secure than in earlier revisions. Still it is an exquisitely bad idea and a huge attack surface to expose your PCIe to an external connector.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by DrYak View Post

                Glass Optical Fiber ? (GOF) Yeah, sure. It's an expensive medium, and requires expensive equipment to cut and crimp.

                Plastic Optical Fiber ? (POF) Nope. It is cheap.
                Ehmm. The cost of fiber is not the fiber cables themselves, they are much cheaper than copper, many places existing copper connections are being replaced with fiber because the copper is too valuable and gets stolen. The expensive part of fiber is the connectors that transforms between optical and electrical signals.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by ldo17 View Post
                  Fibre -- made from glass, which in turn is made from sand. What are the world reserves of sand like these days?
                  Pretty bad, actually. We are running out.

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                  • #39
                    Its the raping of land and misuse of the resource from not recycling old materials that's making it appear to be running out. Still plenty out there, and for glass fibre, you would be hard pressed in the immediate future to exhaust sand purely for that.
                    Hi

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
                      Pretty bad, actually. We are running out.
                      Hmmm ... but as any economist will tell you, a “resource” is anything that somebody is willing to pay for. So on that basis, humanity will never run out of resources. Consider that the set of important “resources” was rather different, say, 100 years ago, and it will be different again, 100 years from now. We use what we have to hand, for the purposes that are currently important to us.

                      Take copper itself as an example. It’s not as good an electrical conductor as silver. So why don’t we use silver instead?

                      Because it’s too expensive. Because there is too little silver left in the world.. So copper gives better price/performance overall.

                      The same thing is true with sand for making glass. Existing glass-making businesses run technological processes that are optimized to the kinds of sand that are easily available. As these become harder to get, they have to adapt their processes to use other sources. And so it goes.

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