4 ms·
In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion) and would be fun to hack on.
by ChuckMcM 5y ago
In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion) and would be fun to hack on.
That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs.
- jamesfmilne 5y agohttps://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-expansion-systems.html https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-exp...
- ChuckMcM 5y agoThanks! Of course they are bit GPU centric but the idea is there. Very interesting stuff. I wonder both if the Zynq Ultrascale RFSOC PCIe card would work in that chassis and if I could get register level access out of MacOS.
- jamesfmilne 5y agoYes, you can interface with PCIe devices using DriverKit, Apple's new user-space device driver platform. No need to run inside the kernel for these things any more. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pcidriverkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pcidriverkit
- dheera 5y ago> USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus Oh please hell no. I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best cables I can get my hands on. File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-transfer and corrupt the file system. Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is the reality of my life that UX researchers don't see because they haven't sent me an e-mail and surveyed me. Never had such problems with PCIe.
- droopyEyelids 5y agoFriendly reminder that USB-C is a form factor, and thunderbolt is the actual transfer protocol. Sounds like you're listing the common complaints with usb-3 over usb-c peripherals, which are not a suitable replacement for PCIe. Thunderbolt is something different, more powerful & more reliable.
- toastal 5y agoThunderbolt 3 is USB4
- Tepix 5y agoUSB4 is the successor to USB 3.2 and TB3.
- makeitdouble 5y agoThunderbolt is more reliable, but still weirdly unstable on the software support sometimes. I don't get why we still have external monitor detection issues on macs at this day and age for instance.
- delusional 5y agoYou have a very exotic configuration if you plugged your webcam and thumb drives into PCIe slots.
- makeitdouble 5y agoWebcam are often positioned as cheapish accessories so PCIe is exotic, but for internal drives (parent's comment wasn't about "thumb" drives) it's pretty mainstream: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=pcie+drive https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=pcie+drive TBH, even a thumb drive would have me pissed if it disconnected at random times. That's what I hated about using the SD slot of MacBooks to host a semi-permanent drive.
- icelancer 5y agoMy USB-C dongle (AMD processor, so not Thunderbolt) that has PD plugged into it permanently and is my "docking station" for the office, and I have to cycle its power (unplug/plug PD) to get the DisplayPort monitor that's connected to it to work, on top of the fact that there are other issues with it, especially with external drives as you also reported. So, I'm in total agreement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 5y ago> That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs. I hope we get closer to that long-standing dream over the next few years. But right now you can see laptop manufacturers so desperate to avoid thunderbolt bottlenecks that they make their own custom PCIe ports. For the longest time, thunderbolt ports were artificially limited to less than 3 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, and even now the max is 4 lanes.
- BillinghamJ 5y agoAn eGPU enclosure is exactly what you're describing - PCIe x16 over TB4. They're quite commonplace now
- Tepix 5y agoNo, TB4 is PCIe x4, unchanged since TB3.