3 ms·
I find it amusing that every single one of our high-speed standards (ethernet, HDMI, PCIE, displayport, USB) are basically just the same high-speed differential
by mmastrac 5y ago
I find it amusing that every single one of our high-speed standards (ethernet, HDMI, PCIE, displayport, USB) are basically just the same high-speed differential pairs under the hood with different framing.
I don't know exactly what we can do about this situation, but at some point it probably makes sense for all of them to converge into a multi-lane, differential-pair standard (or just support nesting each other arbitrarily).
- madeofpalk 5y agoIIRC Thunderbolt essentially is "PCIE but in a cable"
- mmastrac 5y agoThat's my understanding as well.
- paulmd 5y agoThunderbolt actually includes a lot of other stuff that isn't just "pcie" in a cable - like USB and DisplayPort streams in addition (at the same time) to the PCIe links. There is also U.2 for shorter links. There are relatively trivial risers (not sure if it needs a chip or not, but either way they're under $30) that let you turn regular PCIe x4 or M.2 x4 slots into U.2 cables. It's intended for the enterprise space but if you just want "pcie in a cable" that's what it does. ExpressCard actually also was a PCIe 1.1x1 or 2.0x1 link as well, and people used risers to break out to external GPUs just as people do with thunderbolt. There are various eGPU setups "GDC Beast" is one I remember?) that are still available for ye olde thinkpad if you want more/better display connectors. Also obviously miners use those shitty USB-based riser cables (they aren't USB, but use USB wiring?) with x1 connectivity. I dunno whether any of those are "legal" according to the PCIe signalling requirements but in practice you can get short runs pretty reliably especially at lower speeds, and good PCIe riser cables can even do 3.0x16 or 4.0x16 capability.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- floatboth 5y agoI've heard it's more like a "complex proprietary MPLS style network layer that can carry PCIe and DP and whatnot". They wouldn't be able to do daisy chaining if it was bare PCIe, but it does sound horrible.
- akelly 5y agoMaybe we can call it a Universal Serial Bus
- mmastrac 5y agoHow many parallel differential pairs can you have before it's no longer serial? Hah.
- NoSorryCannot 5y agoYou can have arbitrarily many, so long as the serial lanes are independent of each other. PCIe can have lots, for example. Because they are independent, they won't suffer from clockskew problems that made parallel signaling impractical at high speeds and it's often not required to connect all of the wires (e.g. an x16 card hanging out of an x8 or smaller slot) .
- lionkor 5y agoI like the idea! Let's start with v1.0, and then just let our PR team decide on the next versions
- aenis 5y agoNah, we cant go with 1.0. Bad for adoption. Since we can push 10Gbps easily, and maybe up to 40Gbps if we try hard, lets call the first version usb "ultraspeed" and let the marketing guys work with that!
- TwoNineFive 5y agoDid you just call for a Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 of data bus standards?