Intel recently conducted a technical presentation at its development center in Israel to share information on its latest products. Recently, Intel confirmed that Raptor Lake could be clocked at 6GHz, and shared more information about its processor design and verification process.
According to TomsHardware, Intel demonstrated the next-generation Thunderbolt port for the first time today, using a USB-C cable in a public how-to video, at speeds up to 80 Gbps. There is no official name for the new port, though, and it’s unclear when it will be released. In fact, last year Gregory Bryant, executive vice president, and general manager of Intel’s client computing group, accidentally posted a photo by mistake, exposing the data transfer speed of the new generation of Thunderbolt, and letting people know that the speed will be doubled.
Image: Tom’s Hardware
Recently, the USB Promoter Group announced the upcoming release of the USB4 2.0 specification, which can achieve a data transfer rate of up to 80 Gbps through a USB Type-C cable. The new generation of Thunderbolt ports also doubles the speed, and Intel is likely to use a similar naming scheme rather than just calling it Thunderbolt 5. At present, it is only known that the speed of the new generation of Thunderbolt will double, and Intel has not announced specific technical specifications.
Image: Tom’s Hardware
Intel’s development center in Haifa, Israel, is responsible for all of its Thunderbolt and USB work, ranging from product definition, hardware, software design and verification, high-volume manufacturing (HVM), and product implementation. Thunderbolt products can be tested and certified at nine facilities around the world using an Intel-supported ecosystem.
At this year’s CES 2022 show, AMD released the Ryzen 6000 series of APUs. This Zen 3+ architecture product, code-named Rembrandt, has further optimized the original Zen 3 architecture, using a 6nm process and equipped with a core of the RDNA 2 architecture, supports USB 4, PCIe 4.0, and LPDDR5/DDR5 memory at the same time, and can be configured with up to 8 cores and 16 threads. The new generation of APUs has numerous new technical features that complement the shortcomings of the Ryzen 5000 series.
USB 4 is the fifth major revision of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard, with double the transfer speed (40 Gbps) compared to USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, it is compatible with Thunderbolt 3 devices, which provides dynamic bandwidth allocation, and also provides support for USB-PD. USB 4 introduced a tunneling protocol that allows multiple protocols including USB, DisplayPort, and PCIe to run simultaneously. AMD’s support for USB 4 on the Ryzen 6000 series APUs can greatly improve the scalability of its platform.
According to Phoronix, AMD is currently modifying the Linux driver to enhance USB 4/Thunderbolt support and better adapt to different usage scenarios. Its latest effort revolves around the “is_thunderbolt” check used by the kernel driver. If the device is connected via Thunderbolt instead of directly via PCIe, this technology will modify the behavior of the device to solve the problem of the device being a removable/external connection. Since the “is_thunderbolt” check was initiated for Intel’s earlier Thunderbolt master chips, the command completion event is not included.
AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello released a series of “is_thunderbolt” patches last week, the driver behavior covering AMD’s USB 4 design. AMD has also simplified the relevant driver code in this series of patches, and its path involves eGPU and other support.
Microsoft previously issued a support announcement confirming that when Windows 10 is connected to an NVMe protocol solid-state drive, it may cause a blue screen of death problems.
Theoretically, this problem mainly affects devices with Thunderbolt interface. When the user connects the SSD through this interface, it may trigger a blue screen.
The error code that appears when the blue screen of death occurs is DRIVER_VERIFIER_DMA_VIOLATION. Currently, Microsoft has launched a cumulative update to fix it.
Microsoft has released the update log of KB4586853 cumulative update with a test nature yesterday, but Microsoft did not mention this aspect in the update log.
However, Microsoft issued a separate support announcement indicating that it has fixed the blue screen of death problem, which is mainly caused by the incompatibility of some old drivers.
The affected operating systems are mainly Windows 10 20H1 and Windows 10 20H2. Other versions lower than 20H1 are not affected by this issue.
However, the current repair is a cumulative update with a test nature. Based on stability considerations, it is recommended that users can release a stable update on the routine update day next Wednesday.
Of course, if you can’t wait, you can also manually download this cumulative update offline installation package for deployment, and restart the system after deployment to solve this problem.
The speed of Microsoft adding Type-C interface to the Surface product line is relatively slow compared to other manufacturers, and when the Surface product line finally has a product that adds Type-C interface, this product does not support Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt technology (compared to ordinary transfer protocols is faster and can also be connected to hardware such as graphics cards), which undoubtedly disappointed some Surface fans.
Recently, Microsoft explained this in a security-related report, and explained in general why the Surface product line has not been equipped with a Type-C interface that supports Thunderbolt technology, and why the devices of the Surface product line can’t upgrade RAM.
The first is the description of Thunderbolt technology. Microsoft said that because Thunderbolt technology uses DMA (direct memory access) technology, hackers can directly read and write devices through the Thunderbolt interface without hacking the operating system and processor. This will undoubtedly allow some hackers to directly read any data in your device’s memory (such as Bitlocker keys and other encryption keys) by cracking the device, and even say that malware bypass the lock screen.
For the same reason, Microsoft also soldered the memory of all Surface product line devices to the motherboard, because if you don’t solder the memory to the motherboard, hackers can use liquid nitrogen to save the memory data. Attackers use an external memory reader to obtain important data such as encryption keys.
Although these security-related examples cited by Microsoft are actually present, in fact, most ordinary users do not care about this, and if a hacker wants to hack a computer, he certainly will not only have these two methods.
