Of course, it’s anybody’s guess how long it will be before Apple (and PC makers) start shipping systems with TB5 support, how good the initial deployments will be, and what the devices will cost when they ship.
It’s a first product, but I question its usefulness, since it seems to require being piggy-backed to pre-existing DisplayPort and Thunderbolt ports from your motherboard and GPU.
Looks more like a proof-of-concept device. It may be useful for tunneling 64 Gbps of PCIe data to external devices, but for the advanced video capabilities, it looks like it’s just a pass-through for existing video ports - which you could just use directly.
But hopefully this indicates that motherboard designers (at least Gigabyte and Asus) will soon be providing TB5 ports that have built-in integration of power and video.
This is how these Thunderbolt expansion cards have always worked (I have a nearly identical TB4 card in my PC.) The looped-in DisplayPort is an inelegant solution, but it’s the only way to get the Thunderbolt certification from Intel (DisplayPort support is a required part of the spec, and a lot of CPUs still do not have onboard video — hence the janky workaround for the discrete graphics card users.)
I’m surprised that nobody (as far as I know) other than Apple has made PCIe GPU cards with Thunderbolt ports. Looking at GPUs sold today, it appears that NVIDIA cards ship with video-only ports (DisplayPort and HDMI) and although AMD ships cards with a USB-C port, it is not Thunderbolt. It would seem to me that adding a single TB4/5 port to a video card that sells for over $1000 should be a no-brainer.
Apple did it (with TB3) for the various AMD cards they shipped for the 2019 Mac pro, but it would seem that nobody else has expressed interest in shipping such a design.
I guess the question becomes why. Maybe Thunderbolt just isn’t that popular in the PC world and the companies made a business decision, but it still seems funny that all (as far as my searches have been able to determine) of the third-party video card makers that license the NVIDIA and AMD chipsets seem to have made the same decision. (Searching for GPU chipsets and Thunderbolt only shows the two together in external GPU devices, not on PCIe cards.)
Or is there a technical reason? Maybe they’re using every square inch of board space for the GPU, its RAM and support circuitry and therefore have no room for a Thunderbolt interface chip? But I’d find that a bit hard to believe.
The additional expense of adding the Thunderbolt controller and also having to submit every model of your card for certification by Intel (which would have to be done by every graphics card manufacturer, not just AMD or Nvidia, but also ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, etc.)
DisplayPort and HDMI specs tend to advance a little more quickly than Thunderbolt (which is always tied to a static DisplayPort version.)
There are no high performance (>60hz refresh rate) displays which support Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt definitely hasn’t been as important in the PC world as in Mac, but that’s changing a bit. A lot of mid-range and higher PC laptops now have at least one Thunderbolt port, and USB4 is based on Thunderbolt 3/4 (minus the Intel certification.) I think eventually we will get to the world which Apple tried to create in 2016 where the only port you need is a Thunderbolt USB-C port, but that’s probably still 3-5 years away.
Speaking of Thunderbolt and displays: The Apple Studio display’s only input is Thunderbolt 3. The specs say nothing about compatibility with anything but Macs and a few iPads.
Does this mean that it wouldn’t work with a PC, even one with a Thunderbolt 3 port?
Is the display using DisplayPort or HDMI over Thunderbolt?
Apple’s Thunderbolt displays require Thunderbolt - they don’t work with a USB-C port that is not Thunderbolt.
Which means they are not generic DisplayPort displays relying on DisplayPort alternate mode.
If I remember from old discussions, there is a Thunderbolt transceiver in the display. It will demultiplex one of the Displayport streams (Thunderbolt can support up to two per interface) for itself to display, and will act as a USB hub for the remaining three downstream ports.
Unlike older Thunderbolt displays, this one doesn’t have a downstream Thunderbolt port, so the data chain ends there. Displays with a downstream Thunderbolt port will propagate all unused Thunderbolt data (e.g. the second video stream, PCIe data, etc.) downstream to another Thunderbolt device.
If you have a PC with a Thunderbolt 3 (or 4) port that is carrying DisplayPort 1.4 video data, it should work. But it’s not recommended. Apple’s displays have no physical controls and require a special control panel that Windows users won’t have in order to adjust things like brightness, contrast and color calibration. There are tools to download the BootCamp drivers and add them to Windows systems not running on Mac hardware, but even then, there are some things you won’t be able to do (e.g. upgrade the display’s firmware, support TrueTone or use Center Stage)
