Intel Offers Up Royalty-Free Thunderbolt 3 To USB Promoter Group

[bobwya]

USB 4? Not USB 3.2.5.7.54.a.rc3?

Nice :-)

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Plus it was also announced the USB4 specifcation is based on the Thunderbolt protocol.

[Jumbotron]

Thank you Intel. Along with this and the news just breaking that LunarG is donating its Vulcan SDK to Khronos, this is good and happy news in the Open Source world !

[Guest]

The cynic in me says they're just trying to fix the bad PR around Thunderclap.

[microcode]

The main problem with this is thunderbolt is inherently insecure... so you can end up with devices on your system that have full DMA access, and you have no idea what they are doing. USB on the other hand is mostly geared toward storage and peripherials IO.

Thunderbolt can be secured. There is memory protection for DMA, and nothing says it can't be improved. Apple implements this protection incorrectly, and MS leaves it turned off by default.

[M@yeulC]

USB 4? Not USB 3.2.5.7.54.a.rc3?

Well, if we go by their recent logic it should in theory USB 3.2 Gen 2x4 (4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 links, for 40GBps bandwidth)... but there's nothing logical in that naming scheme, they change it every release (retroactively...). Therefore, I propose... Thunderbus! That should make everyone happy

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Yay. Only 1 year late.

They announced I believe in May of 2017 making it royalty free.

Found it:

Royalty situation

On 24 May 2017, Intel announced that Thunderbolt 3 would become a royalty-free standard to OEMs and chip manufacturers in 2018, as part of an effort to boost the adoption of the protocol.^[62]. As of February 2019 Intel still has not opened up their royalties, and there are no AMD chipsets/computers with Thunderbolt support released or even announced.

This frees up Apple to move to AMD based CPUs.

[Venemo]

Wow, this is great news. Hopefully, the price of external GPU boxes will finally go down. Also, maybe AMD laptops can now have Thunderbolt ports as well. Cool!

[[TV]]

This was supposed to already happen last year. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel freaked out about the continued success of Ryzen and just delayed the release slightly to keep that advantage a bit longer. Keeping Thunderbolt proprietary this long has already been terrible for wider adoption and affordably priced audio interfaces. The cheapest one is 499$/€. The once king of prosumer audio interfaces, M-audio, exhibited a Thunderbolt product in NAMM early 2015 that to this day has not been released.

I'm still chugging along with my ancient pci cards, because their latencies can only be beaten by these new Thunderbolt interfaces.

[wizard69]

Better late than never, I guess. Hopefully, we'll finally get some cheaper eGPU cases...

An eGPU will never be “cheap”. You basically have all the hardware a PC has combined with a extremely limited market. If anything the cost will likely go up in the future.

Due to the issue of cost and other factors I don’t expect to ever see eGPU’s as anything more than a niche product with niche pricing. In fact I’m kinda expecting the market to dry up over time.