I’ve been wanting to use Thunderbolt for a long time so I could move my PC away from where I sit, mainly due to noise from mechanical drives etc… I did test out a TB3 dock with a 2 meter active TB3 cable some time ago, but the results were discouraging back then due to my Alienware AW3418DW monitor really didn’t like to wake up again from monitor sleep or hibernating PC (would require a power cycle on the dock to fix) . So I read some news about Thunderbolt 4, although the info out there is slim at best.
I would need a 10 meter active cable, and the only current thing that exist are the Corning Fiber Optic TB3 Type-C cables, however they are extremely expensive and only supported for Mac OS. I thought I read something about USB4 / TB4 would support long cables as well, anyone know something about that?
And before someone suggest I use a NAS to move the noise from my HDD away, please don’t! I hate those nasty little expensive boxes! No direct control over your drives and such a PITA to setup and maintain.
I doubt it … TB4 is more bandwidth, and marrying the TB/USB standards a bit more closely.
Thunderbolt on a desktop is a cool flex and all, but if distance is what you need, consider HDMI or somewhat DisplayPort for the display and an active USB 3.2 extension cable + hub for accessories.
Actually TB4 is the same bandwidth as TB3 which is 40 gbps, but besides that your suggestion is good, however I would need cables that are more than 5 meters. Both USB2/3/DP1.4 will have major problems once you go over 5 meters and will need to use active cables, and then the price goes up dramatically.
Hope that maybe the optical cables have become more mature now - had USB3/TB2 Corning cables that died a little after two years of use.
The plugs with the heat-generating active transceivers were not plugged in directly next to others so there was air circulating around them and the room temperature ranges from 21°C to 27°C, depending on the season.
But the current optical TB3 cables don’t seem to support DisplayPort 1.4, that sucks…
I don’t think that’s gonna be the case. TB3 is already pushing the limits of stranded copper cable so I don’t think TB4 is gonna make any difference.
As far as I know the new standard should iron out all the bugs (performance and, most importantly, security related) that TB3 had.
I look forward to the day we’re sticking server grade 400G QSFP-DD optical transceivers in our graphics cards and 8k 1000hz monitors, or whatever the fuck it’ll take to get there. Hell, nvidia bought mellanox, wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of bizarre hybrid GPU/NIC shows up eventually.
I don’t know if it’s a problem with copper, or the myriad of companies that can’t help but shit out substandard cables. And that’s before the DP/HDMI barely evolving nonsense.
That bizarre hybrid GPU/NIC was announced. It is called the NVIDIA BlueField-2X DPU. It is a 200G converged NIC with NVIDIA Ampere cores. It supports RDMA/RCoE and GPUDirect. You can load textures from a NVMe drive on another host into VRAM without using CPUs over ethernet.
The USB Type-C specification v2.0 was released with USB4. It adds Optically Isolated Active Cables (OIACs) that support up to 50m.
