This WAS under NDA… Until I Called in a Favor

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This WAS under NDA… Until I Called in a Favor”.
Watch I’m gon na take this Thunderbolt cable connect. These two computers drag these giant files across and whoo-hoo-hoo mama 800 megabytes per second.. That is like installing the new Modern Warfare in less than five minutes., And I can practically hear your chair scraping the floor. As you jump up to go and try this but hold on a second., You can’t just plug two computers together and transfer files between them like that., And you especially can’t run a game on one PC and then play it completely. Losslessly on another., And yet here I am doing it. What you guys are looking at is, in my opinion. Finally, the answer to what exactly is it that makes Thunderbolt special now that Intel gave the spec to the USB-IF And, if you’re anything like me, your head is absolutely swimming with questions right now.. How are they doing lossless encoding? What is the latency like? Do I really have to find out after the segue to our sponsor Headphone juice is not something you should be proud of.. These are your typical headphones that accumulate heat. While you game., Ew. Wicked, Cushions, add a cooling gel to their cushions to keep your ears sweat-free.. You can easily replace them on your headset. Check out Wicked Cushions at the link below..

What you were just looking at is called Thunderbolt Share and it’s in essence, a piece of software that establishes a point-to-point network connection between two Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 5 Windows PCs.. It features exceptionally high bandwidth and hyper-low latency, which kind of makes sense, since you may recall that Thunderbolt is essentially a four-lane-wide PCIe connection with extras, like USB, for peripherals DisplayPort for monitors and power for one-cable docking.. Let’S start by revisiting that file transfer demo that I just showed you guys, because it’s A the most obvious use case for this and B the easiest to understand in terms of the data flow..

Our files get pulled off of the SSD of the first machine. They get packed in two packets, they flow through the Thunderbolt chip through the Thunderbolt cable and then they get unpacked on the other side and dumped onto the SSD.. Now I’m still a strong advocate for networked rather than point-to-point data management solutions, but it’s a pinch. Guys. You’re at the hotel trying to back up some footage to a colleague, who’s flying home in the morning or you’re at a LAN, and your buddy needs to grab a game install..

This will allow data transfers at theoretical speeds of up to 20 gigabit per second. For Thunderbolt 4 and 40 gigabit for Thunderbolt 5, which would bring that modern warfare install that I talked about before down to under a minute. And other than high CPU usage during the transfer and Thunderbolt’s one-meter passive cable length limit. There is no downside., It’s just ripping. Fast. Now let’s push this button..

This is incredible. Even with a 10 or 25 gigabit network connection. I have never in my life, seen a PC-to-PC game stream. With this little latency.

I mean I obviously haven’t measured it with a high-speed camera yet.. I don’t have one in my pocket, but to the eye I would describe the latency as none. And that’s because every other solution, Steam Link, Moonlight et cetera, relies on the GPU to render each frame encode it with a significant loss of fidelity and then transfer it To where it needs to be where it is received, unpacked and then finally, output to the display.. By contrast, this is not encoded at all.

And before you call BS because believe me, I was thinking the same thing have a look at this pudding, because the proof is in it. While mirroring. We find none of the visual anomalies that I would normally associate with. Even a very high-quality AV1, stream. And task manager over here is picking up some very serious bandwidth that is coming over that virtual link about four gigabit.. There is, of course, some optimization taking place. Here. Intel created their own remote, desktop protocol that handles turning your display’s output into Thunderbolt packets and that allows them to reduce bandwidth by updating, only changed elements on the remote display.

But it does basically what it says on the tin. We’re a little cagey about the details, but as far as I can tell that high CPU usage – oh 25 % on a Core Ultra 7 155H – is just the cost of doing business when you’re receiving a data Stream this wide and the GPU usage is the secret sauce that makes this work so well. Intel says they are going straight from GPU frame buffer on this side to GPU frame buffer on the other side., No storage bottleneck, they aren’t even dumping it into RAM.. The software is still in alpha with no committed release date for now, so we’re just scratching the surface of what a link like this could unlock in the future, but I’m already extremely impressed by what I’ve seen and imagining countless applications for this.. I mean I showed you guys. It goes both ways right. We can see the screen from the one we can use the controller from this one. On the other one. I mean get this built into Windows and you wouldn’t need a silly dual-screen laptop, no offense, no offense dual-screen laptops are great just to share content with a colleague..

You just plug their computer into yours and boop flawless.. Oh here’s, another one.! This would turn every outdated, all-in-one or laptop as long as it has Thunderbolt 4 and up into a monitor. Also by the way, while you’re at it Intel didn’t talk to them about this ahead of time. Please release the remote desktop application.. I know I’m an edge case, but I would totally wire up my house for 25 gig fiber, if I could just have all my compute in a rack and then use thin clients for everything..

Of course, wires are passe. Now anyway.. Let’S move a couple of paces. This way where Intel is showing off their other next big thing for connectivity., I already got my first taste of Wi-Fi 7 when I unboxed an Eero Mesh, Wi-Fi kit over on Short Circuit.

And being the cynic that I am, I was blown away when, for once It actually delivered on the kind of generational performance upgrade that they claimed. Check this out.. These are real world transfer speeds at two three, even in excess of four gigabit per second..

I mean that is faster than what 99 % of people are getting with a wire right, now. And this easily lives up to Wi-Fi 7’s, EHT or extremely high throughput moniker.. Now your first reaction is probably. Why should I care, I mean no one’s internet? Is that fast. And okay? Well, first of all, there are some people princes need internet too, but that is a valid point.. I mean the services that you use online are likely to be a bottleneck before your Wi-Fi is at these kinds of speeds., Except that Wi-Fi rarely performs at peak efficiency due to range limitations.. It’S not always gon na be like this., Not to mention network congestion..

So you’re gon na get some fraction of that maximum speed., And, given that it’s a lot higher than it used to be, it’s gon na be a lot higher than it used to be.. Also, this is perhaps more important once everyone makes the switch non-streaming data transfers will be completed so much faster, that it will free up air time for everyone else which will help to aid with congestion.. That’S just a small part of the justification for the speed though.. This will enable Wi-Fi to be used for completely new applications.. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of seeing 4K video touted as a use case for the next gen Wi-Fi..

Didn’T you just tell me the old one was good for that, And I mean 8K okay fair enough, but seems to have pretty much completely petered out., But a PC grade wireless VR headset with nearly native video quality. Okay, that is really exciting., And there is so much more.. It’S felt for a long time like each generation of Wi-Fi, was all about support for more devices rather than making the one PC that I have in my basement.

Go faster., Not this time.. One of the big keys to this is a carryover from Wi-Fi 6. Reduced congestion thanks to support for the six gigahertz band.. Part of this is that it just hasn’t gotten clogged up yet like the five gigahertz and especially 2.4 gigahertz bands. But much more significant is the fact that six gigahertz doubled the maximum channel width to 320 megahertz. And there’s the fact that Wi-Fi 7 can actually utilize connections on more than one band.

At the same time, using multi-link operation or MLO. MLO is sick. Depending on the radio configuration it can enable either higher overall throughput, as data can be broken up and transmitted over different bands simultaneously, or this is great for the gamers out there lower latency as low As one millisecond by utilizing the first available band, instead of being forced to wait, its turn like it would on a single band.. Let’S go gamers.. Another improvement for individual users comes in the form of 4K QAM. That’S Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, which is a method for translating digital packets into analog signals by varying the amplitude and phase of the radio signal..

Okay, that’s a lot to digest, but in a nutshell, instead of having a maximum of 1,024 values per symbol, which is the smallest amount of data that can be transmitted, we can have one of 4,096 values which results in about a 20 % transmission increase over Wi-Fi 6, all other things being equal. And of course, there are some multi-client things as well. Wi-Fi 6 added the ability for multiple clients to transmit data to an access point simultaneously.. This is achieved through a technology called OFDMA which basically establishes multiple sub-carriers within Wi-Fi channels.. These sub-carriers are grouped resource units which can each be assigned to a client device.. Well, Wi-Fi 7 expands on this by allowing a client to be assigned multiple resource units., So you’re not leaving capacity.

That’S just sitting there unused when there aren’t many clients connected. Okay. This is a good thing for individuals as well. Man.

I love this stuff. Speaking of connected clients. Preamble puncturing was an optional feature of Wi-Fi 6 that is now enabled across the board and allows modern devices to utilize channels that are partly occupied by legacy. Users.. Let’S say, for example, an old Wi-Fi IP camera is using 40 megahertz in the middle of an otherwise unused 160 megahertz wide channel..

Well, preamble puncturing allows a Wi-Fi, 6 or 7 device to recognize that the channel is partially occupied and to utilize all the unoccupied portions of that channel.. So in our example, that would be 120 megahertz of bandwidth where, under previous standards, you’d be limited to the largest contiguous unused portion of the channel just 80.. That was done back then to avoid interference, but it left 40 megahertz of bandwidth completely unused..

There’S more. Conversations between APs and client devices are often called spatial streams. And without boring you all completely to death. Modern APs can deal with more than one spatial stream at a time.. Just how many they can deal with is usually a spec on the box with the ridiculous acronym of MU-MIMO. That is multi-user, multiple input, multiple output. And the values. Typically look like 2×2, 4×4 or hey, maybe 8×8, if you’re a real baller.. The Wi-Fi 7 spec now allows for up to 16 simultaneous clients worth of input and output., That is 16×16 MU-MIMO., But the reality of it is most devices aren’t going to implement that.

I mean Wi-Fi 6 supported 8×8, but even a $ 600 Wi-Fi 6E router, like Netgear’S Nighthawk only implemented 4×4 and your laptop or smartphone is probably only 2×2.. By the way on that topic, don’t let manufacturers fool you., More antennae, sticking out of a device does not automatically equal better MIMO performance.. While it is true that 2×2 requires two antennas and 4×4 requires four just because it has eight sticking out of it like this ROG Rapture AX11000 doesn’t mean it can do the maximum 8×8 of Wi-Fi 6E and the same will go for Wi-Fi 7..

In fact, devices capable of max Wi-Fi 7 performance are going to be rare if they exist at all and they’re gon na come with a serious price tag.. But even conservative implementations of Wi-Fi 7 are going to bring us significant improvements., I mean maybe your budget-friendly router. Only implements two-band MLO, but that is still double the bands that you could use before. And now.

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Warranty, don’t listen to me! Listen to your ears! This time. Check out Wicked Cushions at the link below., If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out that ShortCircuit, where I unboxed that Eero Wi-Fi 7 thing.. It’S super expensive and some of the features are locked behind a paywall that I’m kind of not that into. But it’s fast..

It’S really fast., Like even on a phone like more than two and a half gigabit. What .