Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Best Connector You’ve Never Heard Of”.
What is oculink, it sounds like the tech that Dr Octopus uses to control his robot arms legs, but it’s actually an open standard. Pci Express connector with a compact form factor created to compete with Thunderbolt and USB, despite being around for nearly a decade. Oculink has remained a relatively obscure standard, which is a shame because it’s actually pretty awesome. Oculink stands for optical copper link and was initially envisioned as a combination of copper and Optical fiber. However, the need to convert electrical signals into light signals and Back Again means that fiber optics are relatively inefficient over short distances, so the whole Optical element was eventually scrapped, though the name remains. Cu stands for Copper’s chemical symbol, which is itself based on Copper’s, Latin name. Otherwise, it would be spelled aink and I think we can all agree.
That’S just terrible AO AOL Link, acul Link was developed by PCI Sig, the body ch charged with creating standards for the PCI interface oculink 2.0. The most recent version launched in 2017 with a new connector similar to The Standard display port connector. It boasts support for up to four pcie 4.0 lanes and up to 8 gbits per second per Lane for a total of 64 gbits per second of bandwidth, though notably an eight Lane version also exists that places the four-lane version, above both Thunderbolt 3 and four. In terms of transmission speed and on par with Intel’s upcoming Thunderbolt 5, which is supposed to launch sometime in 2024, with 80 gbits per second of bidirectional bandwidth, but only 64 gbits per second of pcie bandwidth now Beyond bandwidth, a primary advantage of oculink is that it’s Far more costeffective, that was particularly the case prior to 2018, when Thunderbolt became a royalty-free standard, but it’s still true Al, be it to a lesser degree simply because it uses cheaper components and doesn’t require quite the same amount of PR decision to manufacture.
It’S. That combination of high performance and a lower price point, which has garnered oculink a devoted following especially on the server side. Now that doesn’t mean there’s no consumer side. Applications oculink reduces the performance gap between internal and external gpus to a very low margin, because it’s significantly faster than Thunderbolt, 3 or 4, but there’s an important caveat, which we’re going to tell you about right after we thank jump story for sponsoring this video elevate. Your content, with millions of authentic impactful and engaging stock photos, videos and more with jump story.
Their jump stories fuse both photo and video for a more engaging experience compared to a static image, and you can even customize their images with a built-in photo editor and background removal tool, check out jump story at the link below and take the leap with your content. Okay, what oculink doesn’t do that Thunderbolt does is provide solid support for hot plugging, with oculink you’re, typically going to want to shut down the system system before swapping components or it might crash. Oculink only uses pcie signals, making it great for connecting a graphics card, network card or storage controller, but Thunderbolt is basically a two-in-one display port SL pcie connector, which can provide video in addition to power and data transfer oculink only transfers data, so an oculink setup is Always going to need at least two cables if you want to connect and power a device at the same time, not to mention that Thunderbolt ports are compatible with USBC cables.
These factors, plus having daddy Intel as a backer, mean that Thunderbolt has much broader adoption in the consumer electronic space and that ubiquity gives Thunderbolt a definite advantage in terms of convenience, especially For Less tech savvy users. Now you could hypothetically create a version of oculink with some or all of the bells and whistles that Thunderbolt offers, but that might be missing out on what makes oculink truly great Thunder bolt is designed to be a generalist connector, a jack of all Jacks. If you will, it’s made to do several different things quite well, wrapped up in a convenient userfriendly package, but generalization comes at the expense of specialization and lower data, transfer speeds and throttling are a result of that compromise. A similarly flexible and multi-purpose oculate connector would also probably be far more expensive because, when you’re, combining a bunch of complex components, exchanging a bunch of different signals in a very very small space that demands both creative engineering and extremely precise manufacturing. Otherwise, there’s going to be interference between these different signals and it won’t be reliable. Thunderbolt 5 is supposed to give us the best of both worlds.
The convenience and versatility of earlier versions of Thunderbolt, but with far faster data transfer, speeds, it’ll be a while before we can see real world benchmarks, but I mean that sounds awesome. It Bears remembering, however, that so long as these connectors remain a bottleneck and performance loss is non-trivial. There will always be space for an improved version of the oculink or another specialized connector to come along and do it better. Here’S open cheers and cheers to you for watching the whole video like it if you liked it dislike it, if you disliked it check out our other videos, comment below with video suggestions and don’t forget to subscribe and follow you’re supposed to do that.
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