That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs.
Very interesting stuff. I wonder both if the Zynq Ultrascale RFSOC PCIe card would work in that chassis and if I could get register level access out of MacOS.
No need to run inside the kernel for these things any more.
I hope we get closer to that long-standing dream over the next few years.
But right now you can see laptop manufacturers so desperate to avoid thunderbolt bottlenecks that they make their own custom PCIe ports.
For the longest time, thunderbolt ports were artificially limited to less than 3 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, and even now the max is 4 lanes.
Oh please hell no.
I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best cables I can get my hands on.
File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-transfer and corrupt the file system.
Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is the reality of my life that UX researchers don't see because they haven't sent me an e-mail and surveyed me.
Never had such problems with PCIe.
Sounds like you're listing the common complaints with usb-3 over usb-c peripherals, which are not a suitable replacement for PCIe. Thunderbolt is something different, more powerful & more reliable.
TBH, even a thumb drive would have me pissed if it disconnected at random times. That's what I hated about using the SD slot of MacBooks to host a semi-permanent drive.
So, I'm in total agreement.