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 DisplayPort 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
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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 DisplayPort 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
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