Intel officially reveals Thunderbolt 4 - A Universal Cable?

I love this. Slowly getting to a one cable future. Now we need more devices. It's mostly only for charging laptops at the moment.
 
If they want this to become standard, they need to make it vendor agnostic. Yes, handing the specifications over to USB-IF was a good start; but they need to drop their certification fee as well. Then the market will adopt it left, right, and center
 
If they want this to become standard, they need to make it vendor agnostic. Yes, handing the specifications over to USB-IF was a good start; but they need to drop their certification fee as well. Then the market will adopt it left, right, and center

It's been a free standard for a few years now. Intel is just the only ones who are making the chips. Nobody else has started producing their own. This is because it's built into their CPUs so there was little reason to make an extra dedicated chip that would add more ports when Intel already supported upto 2 ports using 2 lanes each(or 1 port at 4 lanes).
 
It's been a free standard for a few years now. Intel is just the only ones who are making the chips. Nobody else has started producing their own. This is because it's built into their CPUs so there was little reason to make an extra dedicated chip that would add more ports when Intel already supported upto 2 ports using 2 lanes each(or 1 port at 4 lanes).

They may have made claims of plans like this, but Thunderbolt has never been a free standard. They diverted the need to make Thunderbolt a free standard by merging the underlying technology with USB4, until the USB4 announcement last year Intel had made no progress on their desire to make TB a free standard.

IE Intel only started allowing other companies to make TB controllers last year (According to them) with the release of the tech to the USB-IF, and even now they still charge a certification fee for Intel/official ThunderBolt certification.

Until the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 Intel had outright rejected certification for any other attempt at using the Thunderbolt chips(Which have always existed in discrete forms, it's only with late 2019 mobile systems that a TB host controller is actually part of the CPU) from being used with AMD platforms. NOTE: It was *NOT* for technical reasons, these Thunderbolt host controllers were tested to work fine with previous AMD platforms with a simple firmware modification that disabled checks.

There's little doubt imo that the artificial practical limitations placed on who could create Thunderbolt devices, and the huge costs of certifying TB devices officially, has hampered the growth and adoption of it. Even now it sort of feels like too little too late for TB4 unless they drop or at least open up the certification fee and process, especially when vendors can get much of the actual functionality from the USB4 spec.
 
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It's free and you're just plain wrong.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/newsro...underbolt-3-everywhere-releases-protocol/amp/

You love to always be right but good luck arguing with Intel's own website. Clearly says royalty free. You also cannot say it's never been free then immediately say it's free in your next sentence. You don't pay for it. It may be integrated with USB-IF but that does not mean any USB C is TB. There is still a difference.

In addition to this in today's announcement the only thing Intel mentions on their website, is mandatory certification. Nothing about a fee.

Your argument of certificate fees are based off a Tom's hardware article that was inferring the information that was not said by Intel. When they announced TB4 in January TW reported on this when Anandtech(widely respected), CNET, etc did not report such a fee.

From Jan 7 this year TW article quotes Intel saying:
"Thunderbolt 4 continues Intel leadership in providing exceptional performance, ease of use and quality for USB-C connector-based products. It standardizes PC platform requirements and adds the latest Thunderbolt innovations. Thunderbolt 4 is based on open standards and is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 3. We will have more details to share about Thunderbolt 4 at a later date."

It says nothing more than what it says. If you can find where they get the certificate fees from that quote, which the article is based off of, then by all means highlight it. They made quite a stretch saying it requires it. Also doesn't make a lot of sense to charge people a certification fee when Intel's own CPUs now support it. 95% of the work is done. All they need is to make the traces to the port.
 
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It's free and you're just plain wrong.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/newsro...underbolt-3-everywhere-releases-protocol/amp/

You love to always be right but good luck arguing with Intel's own website. Clearly says royalty free. You also cannot say it's never been free then immediately say it's free in your next sentence. You don't pay for it. It may be integrated with USB-IF but that does not mean any USB C is TB. There is still a difference.

In addition to this in today's announcement the only thing Intel mentions on their website, is mandatory certification. Nothing about a fee.

Your argument of certificate fees are based off a Tom's hardware article that was inferring the information that was not said by Intel. When they announced TB4 in January TW reported on this when Anandtech(widely respected), CNET, etc did not report such a fee.

From Jan 7 this year TW article quotes Intel saying:
"Thunderbolt 4 continues Intel leadership in providing exceptional performance, ease of use and quality for USB-C connector-based products. It standardizes PC platform requirements and adds the latest Thunderbolt innovations. Thunderbolt 4 is based on open standards and is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 3. We will have more details to share about Thunderbolt 4 at a later date."

It says nothing more than what it says. If you can find where they get the certificate fees from that quote, which the article is based off of, then by all means highlight it. They made quite a stretch saying it requires it. Also doesn't make a lot of sense to charge people a certification fee when Intel's own CPUs now support it. 95% of the work is done. All they need is to make the traces to the port.

Your article proves my point mate, check the date, it's timed with the release of the technology to USB-IF

Also you're maybe confusing my use of free in the sense of "gratis" with free in the sense of "libre"

PS: My experience on this is from working on designs using (Or at least intending to) TB, the TomsHardware article was just an example of the first point Intel certified a non-Intel host platform. You can create compatible hardware, but Intel definitely charge a fee to certify it right now.

PPS: The certification fee is not just for host platforms like laptops and motherboards, and includes use of ThunderBolt tech via USB4 (And for very obvious reasons I can't go into detail or give prices).

PPPS: Note that royalty fees and certification fees are not the same thing at all btw. (You NEVER really get certification for free, if a spec mandates certification then it is never practically actually free)
 
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It proves nothing you said correct. It clearly states free. USB-IF adoption is irrelevant. You can support USB and not TB. Hence your argument is dumb. Even if you disagree, it's now free. Intel said they would do it and they did. End of debate.

Your experience means nothing to me. Whenever anything comes up you always have some excuse. Whether it's your infamous "academic friends" or your "work" or your apparently infinite long work experience working on everything. Anybody can be anybody on the internet

Note that I never said they were or are the same and also stated Intel has not mentioned anything of the sort. The article in question that brought this to light is falsely reporting bad information. The quote is above. You failed to highlight it like I asked because it's not there. End of debate.

Reply back like you always do to get your last word in. I'm out.
 
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It proves nothing you said correct. It clearly states free. USB-IF adoption is irrelevant. You can support USB and not TB. Hence your argument is dumb. Even if you disagree, it's now free. Intel said they would do it and they did. End of debate.

Your experience means nothing to me. Whenever anything comes up you always have some excuse. Whether it's your infamous "academic friends" or your "work" or your apparently infinite long work experience working on everything. Anybody can be anybody on the internet

Note that I never said they were or are the same and also stated Intel has not mentioned anything of the sort. The article in question that brought this to light is falsely reporting bad information. The quote is above. You failed to highlight it like I asked because it's not there. End of debate.

Reply back like you always do to get your last word in. I'm out.

Dude, the onus for evidence is on you. Why would Intel give out certification for free? What sort of for-profit company does that for hardware? Your own articles states it is only royalty free. Your own article states certification is mandatory.

I'm an IET accredited electrical engineer (So anyone can validate my qualifications if they really want to using my name, Thomas Grech, or my company name, GrechTech) and I can give you a list of companies I work with if you like, or which academic institutions I've worked with, but why not just read the articles instead of trusting me? Or maybe research more into what certification processes typically entail? I don't see why you jump at my neck everytime.

Even with free and open standards you still usually pay a respected body to certify hardware btw, just when it's an open (Or free in a libre sense) specification there's the ability for multiple bodies to offer "official" certification and the cost is therefore not a closely guarded secret and typically ends up vastly lower.
 
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Pretty cool to see a free standard being upgraded, Now we just need to slowly move away from the traditional USB connector and start transitioning over to type C :)
 
There are other instances of open standards requiring a certification fee, the first one that comes to mind is EtherCAT. Which is a transfer protocol for industrial equipment. You can develop and run the protocol on fairly standard hardware but if you want to run it in any professional capacity it needs to be certified. At which point you have to pay a hefty certification fee.

Claiming its free and open is ignoring the realities of building and selling products
 
"Intel announced that it contributed the Intel Thunderbolt protocol specification to the USB Promoter Group, enabling other chip makers to build Thunderbolt compatible silicon, royalty-free."

This means that other manufacturers can make Thunderbolt chips without paying a license fee to Intel. It doesn't mean that those chips are free. They cost a pretty penny. That means we can have VIA, or Aquantia Thunderbolt chips now. But certification from Intel and support for drivers will still cost you.

Many professional Audio Interfaces are still released with TB2 because TB3 would raise the cost significantly.

The good thing is that other manufacturers may offer these chips for a lower price than Intel making them cheaper to implement.

Either way, it is a good thing. Having Thunderbolt support via USB4 is amazing. Thunderbolt is basically PCI-E over cable and it is vastly superior to regular USB interface.

Having USB4 on AMD from 2022 and on the next generation of Intel CPUs as standard will make it more popular. Until then it will be easier for AMD board partners to implement it officially in their motherboards.
 
Yeah TB may be slightly cheaper and more open than it was a few years ago, but it's still vastly more expensive, before you even get to hardware costs, and vastly more restrictive, than say attempting to implement USB without the TB3 features.

It's genuinely a shame how many products have to forego using it because of these restrictions and heavy additional costs. Baby steps in the right direction are still good though.
 
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