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Comment by lofaszvanitt | Hacker News Reader

Why the hurry? In the last few years ssd and usb speeds skyrocketed (heatsinks too). Who needs these fast interfaces?

When I get a new MacBook, a thunderbolt cable is still by far the best way for me to move the 1 or 2 TB of stuff from my old one over.

Graphics cards are the first obvious usecase.

Graphics card to what?

Hooking up eGPUs to laptops.

I don't really game, but I would like to have a separate eGPU to hook up to my laptop for ML stuff, rather than have a GPU dedicated to a single box.

I had one of these working for a while, but the thunderbolt drivers were spotty and we were constantly worried it would be all over after some update. The Thunderbolt drivers weren't even available until after boot so we had to unplug it and use onboard graphics and disable them again through the device manager after boot.

At some point it did just stop working.

Was that on Linux or macOS (intel)? I’ve ran them for years with both and they’ve been rock solid.

Windows 10

Thunderbolt is so much nicer than USB, I mean the specs sort of talk for themselves but it’s also far more flexible - you can basically think of it like an extension of the internals of your machine - rather than an external interface.

Hm? USB4 is based on Thunderbolt spec.

They are not equal, I don’t think USB4 even has DMA does it?

USB4 devices can have a minimum of 20Gbps link speeds. In comparison, all Thunderbolt 4 devices have a 32Gpbs minimum requirement.

USB4 has a 7.5W minimum power delivery whereas Thunderbolt 4 doubles it with a minimum delivery of 15W.

With Thunderbolt 4, you’ll always get a minimum of 32Gbps and 15W.

Thunderbolt 4 cables support 40Gbps speeds over 2 meters. In contrast, UBS4 can only support 40Gbps within one meter and reduces to 20Gbps on cables that are 2 meters or longer.

I think you are mixing up usb3 and usb4, here's a good explanation of thunderbolt 4 vs USB 4 (they are exactly the same for all practical purposes): https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/USB-C/thunderbolt4-vs-USB4...

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