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

[wizard69]

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

Found it:



This frees up Apple to move to AMD based CPUs.

I really doubt that Apple went into the co development with Intel without reserving rights to the product. Beyond that ARM is where I expect Apple to first implement this tech.

Even if Apple doesn’t do ARM based Macs, TB ports would be a wise step forward in iPads and iPhones.

[chithanh]

That's what IOMMU is for. It has been available for a decade or so, in the consumer CPUs. With that, devices with DMA have no full memory access.

In theory, an IOMMU should prevent DMA based attacks. In practice, they often fall short, due to buggy implementations in hardware, firmware and operating systems.

Thunderbolt can be secured.

Of course you can secure any arbitrary big attack surface. But that doesn't mean that it is a good idea to expose this attack surface in the first place.

[bachchain]

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 perpherials IO.

The obvious solution is to not plug questionable shit into your computer.

[cb88]

The obvious solution is to not plug questionable shit into your computer.

Hold up lemme epoxy my TB3 ports shut...

[starshipeleven]

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.

He said "cheaper", and I find funny your definition of "all the hardware a PC has" since an eGPU only needs the box (obviously), the GPU and a PSU.

See? No RAM in there, so that's already the biggest cost of making a PC that you are not paying.

[starshipeleven]

I really doubt that Apple went into the co development with Intel without reserving rights to the product.

Thunderbolt is Intel's puppy, not Apple's. Similar to UEFI, Apple was just some form of first adopter.

[starshipeleven]

The obvious solution is to not plug questionable shit into your computer.

the obvious question is how you define "questionable" since anything can be a rubber ducky (i.e. a malicious device).

[Aeny]

Great news. Hopefully AMD can implement Thunderbolt rather quickly, it's the only thing keeping me at Intel..
-Aeny

[LinAGKar]

He said "cheaper", and I find funny your definition of "all the hardware a PC has" since an eGPU only needs the box (obviously), the GPU and a PSU.

See? No RAM in there, so that's already the biggest cost of making a PC that you are not paying.

A GPU case would also not include its own GPU. That's bought separately.

[the_scx]

It doubles the bandwidth of USB

Two-lane operation using existing USB Type-C cables and up to 40 Gbps operation over 40 Gbps-certified cables

doubles the bandwidth of USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, going from 20Gb/s to 40Gb/s

So it will gain bandwidth of the current Thunderbolt 3, but also in USB Mode. Not bad.

Backward compatibility with USB 3.2, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt 3

We would expect the USB4 specification to be essentially a superset of the Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 specifications, thus incorporating both the traditional USB family of protocols (up to and including the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2) and the Thunderbolt 3 protocol in a single document.

Great!

Multiple data and display protocols to efficiently share the total available bandwidth over the bus

it also enables the use of multiple data and display protocols simultaneously

Actually, this isn't great. This is AWESOME!
If I understand correctly, it would be possible to simultaneously use monitor (via DisplayPort Alternate Mode or HDMI Alternate Mode) and eGPU or at least some PCIe 3.0 1x device (via Thunderbolt Alternate Mode) from just one USB4 port.

Currently, offering Thunderbolt 3 requires the use of an additional chip, one of Intel's Alpine Ridge or Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 controllers.

So far, we only had one company that was in charge of Thunderbolt: Intel. Even if we say that it was in collaboration with Apple, it was not the best situation.
Currently, we can expect that the following companies will work (or at least try to) on USB4 controllers:

• Intel (Intel Corporation) - USA 🇺🇸
• AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) - USA 🇺🇸
• TI (Texas Instruments Inc.) - USA 🇺🇸
• NVIDIA (Nvidia Corporation) - USA 🇺🇸
• Apple (Apple Inc.) - USA 🇺🇸
• Fresco Logic (Fresco Logic Inc.) - USA 🇺🇸
• Cypress (Cypress Semiconductor Corporation) - USA 🇺🇸
• Qualcomm (Qualcomm Incorporated) - USA 🇺🇸
• Broadcom (Broadcom Corporation) - USA 🇺🇸
• AMLogic (Amlogic Inc.) - USA 🇺🇸
• NXP/Freescale (NXP Semiconductors N.V./Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.) - EU 🇪🇺
• ST (STMicroelectronics) - EU 🇪🇺
• Renesas/NEC (Renesas Electronics Corporation/NEC Corporation) - Japan 🇯🇵
• Samsung (Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.) - South Korea 🇰🇷
• MediaTek (MediaTek Inc.) - Taiwan 🇹🇼
• ASMedia (ASMedia Technology Inc.) - Taiwan 🇹🇼
• ETRON (Etron Technology, Inc.) - Taiwan 🇹🇼
• VIA (VIA Technologies, Inc.) - Taiwan 🇹🇼
• Zhaoxin (Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co., Ltd.) - China 🇨🇳
• THATIC/HMC/Hygon (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co. Ltd./Haiguang Microelectronics Co. Ltd./Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design Co., Ltd.) - China 🇨🇳
• Huawei/HiSilicon (Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd./HiSilicon) - China 🇨🇳
• Allwinner Technology (Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd.) - China 🇨🇳
• Rockchip (Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.) - China 🇨🇳

Intel has previously announced that its Ice Lake platform, due to ship later this year, will integrate both Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (aka USB 3.2 Gen 2) controllers.

Integration into the platform means that system-builders no longer need to choose whether or not to include the extra chip; the capability will be built in, and as such, we'd expect to see it become nearly universal.

Finally, we can assume that USB4 will gain popularity that Thunderbolt 3 never achieved. It was available only in selected premium devices, and now it is possible that USB4 will become far more common, like USB 3 is today.