About Thunder bolt 3 application scenarios

[HuHeng]

My brother is a technician of Intel, and I am an international trader (I will not sell products here, just seek advice), he told me that Thunder bolt3 related products will have a great market, I want to seek professional Suggestions.
His reasons:
1. The video volume will become larger , and the Thunderbolt3 interface can meet the needs of high-speed transmission.
2. Great demand from gamers
3. In the future, Apple will tend to thunderbolt3
Should I listen to his suggestion to inspect thunderbolt series products or should I go home and beat him?

 

[kirbyrj]

1. I think he/you mean bandwidth not "volume." But yes, and no to that. I'm going to assume that you're talking about video card use as you referenced "gaming" in #2. TB3 is already slower than a traditional PCIe 3.0 connection. Here's an article that describes the issue. TB3 is higher speed/higher bandwidth compared to previous Thunderbolt versions, however, it still pales in comparison to PCIe 3.0 (and likely PCIe 4.0 within the next year from both AMD and Intel). That being said, that's not the only use for TB3 obviously. Yes, it can be a display adapter port and have the bandwidth to support any modern resolution.
2. "Great demand from gamers" is relative. External GPUs are a niche product usually for people who want more graphics power than the IGP on a laptop or small desktop. A high end PC gamer will likely want a true PCIe connection with their expensive cards, and a portable gamer isn't always going to want to carry an external box around with him. It's a useful niche, but it's a niche product.
3. Apple has such a small marketshare that it's almost irrelevant. Also, if rumors have any truth to them then Apple is looking to ditch Intel in favor of their homegrown ARM CPUs. I can't imagine that TB3 is going to be relevant on an ARM CPU based computer.

Personally, I don't see TB3 as being a worthwhile investment in terms of a gaming solution. But I think there are a lot of potential uses for it. The problem is it is relegated to higher end hardware due to the licensing costs.

 

[rhansen5_99]

I remember reading that Intel opened up implementation of thunderbolt, but in my opinion unless mass adoption happens on mid tier pcs then you just have a niche market to work with. Take the ms surface platform would be great to have something portable and then dock serious hardware to it when stationary. Problem is lack of vendor buy in at this point.

 

[GotNoRice]

I think that the greatest thing Thunderbolt has going for it now is that it's gradually becoming more compatible with USB. You still can't plug a thunderbolt-only device into a USB port, but because the new version of thunderbolt uses USB-C, a lot of Thunderbolt 3 devices have built-in support for USB also. For a thunderbolt device that is USB compatible, that dramatically increases the potential market for these devices instead of being forced to market only to college kids and hipsters with apple laptops.