Does Z270 mean we don't need Alpine Ridge?

Zangmonkey

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I'm trying to understand a little bit here.

I know that USB 3.1 controlling has been moved onto the chipset (or CPU? not sure)
Does this also mean thunderbolt?

Do I need to concern myself with looking for Alpine Ridge anymore? Or am I totally misunderstanding this?
 
IIRC, the Z270 itself does NOT support USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt, it only has USB 3.0 features built in. It DOES provide the PCIe lanes for those controllers. So it's up to a particular MB manufacturer to add USB 3.1 and/or Thunderbolt controllers and ports.
 
So none of the boards I've seen are using Alpine ridge. Anybody know one?
 
Definitely seen some Z270 boards announced with thunderbolt 3 on a usb-C port including 3.1g2 and video support, some of them itx! :) With that combo I would assume they must be using alpine ridge or whatever minor revision came along with kaby.
 
I am puzzled by this as well. I've seen numerous comments leading up to the recent launch that said Kaby Lake would bring "native" Thunderbolt 3 support. I haven't been able to discern anything more detailed than that.
 
I've got a watchlist on the asrock itx board, when I get mine I'll check the chip layout. Going by the best board shots so far, the chip right next to the port and obscured by the VRM heatpipe looks like a prime candidate to be the alpine controller or equivalent.
 
Gigabyte seems to be the company using Alpine Ridge the most. Others have Thunderbolt 3 headers onboard so you can plug in a TB3 add-in card and route video through it.

I wish Intel would just add 4 more PCI-E lanes off the processor for TB3 or NVMe support. I'll give props to AMD for doing that with Ryzen. Intel really needs to add at least another 4 lanes to DMI and integrate USB 3.1 or Alpine Ridge into the PCH.
 
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Gigabyte seems to be the company using Alpine Ridge the most. Others have Thunderbolt 3 headers onboard so you can plug in a TB3 add-in card and route video through it.

I wish Intel would just add 4 more PCI-E lanes off the processor for TB3 or NVMe support. I'll give props to AMD for doing that with Ryzen. Intel really needs to add at least another 4 lanes to DMI and integrate USB 3.1 or Alpine Ridge into the PCH.

With Z270 being a minor upgrade over Z170, I didn't expect much to change. I agree with you in principal about all of this but I'm not surprised that Z270 is the way it is. As for Thunderbolt 3, GIGABYTE is practically the only one using it onboard. 4 lanes of DMI would be nice but its not as necessary on this platform as you would think. Generally you won't need it even with two M.2 drives in RAID 0. 4x lanes for M.2 off the CPU probably won't impact anything. I won't know for certain until I get my hands on Ryzen, but that's my best guess for now. DMI 3.0 is more than sufficient to handle a single M.2 drive and even a couple of them most of the time. Again, being fed off the CPU won't impact this.
 
They can't do much without adding more pins to the socket, 115x is the same basic layout of actual data lines since sandy bridge. The only real change was upgrading the DMI link from 2.0 to 3.0 signalling. Intel also allows at least one of the digital video pipes from the socket to be used as an additional x4 2.0 cpu lanes instead but for some reason this is only permitted by the firmware that comes with some Q-series and E3 boards. They are electrically the same, I have some C216 workstations abusing those lanes for NICs.

FWIW the asrock board has the intel 1 port TB3 controller and TI usb 3.1 chipset, first useful ITX board to implement it.
 
One of the advantages of the add-in card route is that they are compelled to allow Displayport in, so you can run video from a discrete video card to the Thunderbolt card input.. then you have a single cable out to a display that supports Thunderbolt. It's pretty slick. Gigabyte did this last year from 1 of their X99 boards with onboard support, but more often than not the Thunderbolt only works with integrated video.

Of course this is currently somewhat moot with TB3 since the displays I'm aware of are only TB2. Hopefully that will change soon.
 
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