With USB 4, Intel is finally making good on the promise of royalty-free 40 Gbps

Naming is not (that) hard. What's usually hard is ignoring the ego that tells us to leave a mark or that we know better than others; i.e. putting your self before the whole.

basch• 7 years ago

when can we start calling it the C4 port?

dylan-m• 7 years ago

I'd be willing to bet the next version is USB4 2.0.

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

If they stick with the current system, next will be USB4.1 Gen 2, while USB4 gets retroactively renamed to USB4.1 Gen 1.

But that's assuming they don't find a creative new way to name USB4 versions poorly.

berbec2• 7 years ago

All I want is a Ryzen laptop with access to an eGPU

Crosseye_Jack2• 7 years ago

It _MIGHT_ be possible today... Kind of... With an ugly hack.

If said laptop has a m.2 port that exposes PCI-e lanes you might be able to use a m.2 to PCI-e adaptor. Dump the Thunderbolt binaries from a Intel UEFI, init a Thunderbolt PCI-e card on an intel system (to load the firmware onto that Thunderbolt Card) and then get Thunderbolt at least under Linux.

Wendel from Level1Techs was able to get Thunderbolt working on a Desktop Threadripper[0].

Obv it would be an ugly (both in looks, as you will have things hanging off the laptop and software as you will have to be injecting code into your UEFI). And if you have a M.2 port with PCIe then might as well just hook the GPU directly to the M.2 <-> PCIe adaptor[1]). Either way you would be limited to 4 PCIe lanes.

And with either method, you still might not get it to work. You might want to check out the eGPU Forums[2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOlQbP63lDQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDyL2tPyXFA

[2] https://egpu.io/forums/

dogma1138• 7 years ago

if you are going to use an m.2 to PCIe adapter might as well dump the middle man and just plug in a PCIe GPU straight into the x4 slot since that would work just fine.

Have a PCIe x4 cable going from the laptop to a box instead of a Thunderbolt cable the only thing you might "lose" is hotswap but technically even that is mainly an electrical problem if you don't use the PCIe power pins hotswap can work just fine.

berbec2• 7 years ago

I'm aware of hacks involving m.2 slots. I find them interesting, but not helpful for a machine i use every day.

eGPU means my laptop is a mullet: Business in the front, party in the back. I want to be able to take it with me to presentations, server rooms, client offices and not have RGBBS dripping out of my keyboard. Then, when I get home, I plug it in and have a gaming rig. TB3/USB4 does this while other solutions are lacking.

examancer• 7 years ago

This is good for everyone. Hopefully the adoption is swift and we can pretend the myriad Thunderbolt/USB-C/USB 3.0 issues, differences, and confusion never happened.

linarism• 7 years ago

This is definitely one of the enabling technologies for Apple to use their own ARM-based CPUs on MacBooks

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

Royalty USB4 sure seems like the time that iPhone would adopt a USB-C connector like their laptops.

ksec• 7 years ago

We already have dozen of other similar submissions.

We have one that has 270 comments here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304857

rasz• 7 years ago

40 Gbps

40 or "40"?, because currently: "dual-port '40 Gbps' Thunderbolt controller has 32 Gbps of PCIe bandwidth total, and each port supports 22 Gbps"

With USB 4, Intel is finally making good on the promise of royalty-free 40 Gbps

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