[gnode]

Thunderbolt 3 controllers have a 4x link to provide one or two ports or 2x in the case of JHL6240. Additionally PCIe is designed to support backwards compatibility and link scaling. I don't see any reason why the 1x gen2 lane of the pi 4 couldn't host a Thunderbolt 3 port; it would just severely bottleneck the bandwidth of tunnelled PCIe links.

Even though it would be limited, a Thunderbolt 3 port would expand the connectivity of the Pi, and very few, if any, devices require the maximum bandwidth to operate at all.

[kllrnohj]

Sure but "hey here's 8x thunderbolt 3 ports just don't ever attempt to use an entire one at once kthx" isn't exactly going to be a great product story, either.

> I don't see any reason why the 1x gen2 lane of the pi 4 couldn't host a Thunderbolt 3 port; it would just severely bottleneck the bandwidth of tunnelled PCIe links.

But that's kind of literally the reason? An entire ecosystem of products assumes a reasonably high amount of bandwidth from the connector. That's its singular reason to exist. If you take away the bandwidth from Thunderbolt 3 it just becomes USB, and at that point why not just offer USB connectors which have even broader support and not as many cabling restrictions?

[gnode]

I agree that 8x Thunderbolt 3 is probably excessive, and I wouldn't want to trade away the current connectivity options as was suggested.

> If you take away the bandwidth from Thunderbolt 3 it just becomes USB

It becomes low bandwidth Thunderbolt / PCIe. You could still use it to attach PCIe devices which don't need a lot of bandwidth. GPUs can be attached for high performance compute where CPU-GPU bandwidth isn't critical. PCIe has non-bandwidth benefits over USB such as DMA and interrupts.

> why not just offer USB connectors which have even broader support and not as many cabling restrictions?

You can't attach PCIe devices via USB, but you can attach USB and PCIe devices via Thunderbolt.

[kllrnohj]

You could also do all that with just a PCI-E x1 slot and use the x1 to remote x16 connector referenced in the blog post to extend it. No reason to mess with Thunderbolt just to have any PCIE capability at all.