- Remember that time
I was upgrading my personal gaming setup
and I had to blur out a super secret cable.
Well, the story there is that I really needed one of these
to complete my setup
but because the product was still in development
I had to sign an extremely restrictive NDA to get it.
Corning had no problem with me using it,
but I didn't end up being able to show you guys
or talk about it for almost another year
while they got it ready for prime time.
But this is it.
Boom, bigger reveal!
It's a pickle.
No, I'm kidding.
It's Corning's Optical Thunderbolt 3 cable
and it might look like any other cable
but it's actually a technical marvel.
And I'm going to tell you guys why.
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(upbeat music)
From the first day I installed a high performance
graphics card in my PC.
I dreamed of a way to keep my gaming space
both cool and quiet
without compromising that sweet, sweet performance.
And when I discovered Corning's Last Generation
optical Thunderbolt 2 cable,
I finally realized that dream.
Using a dock, I could have all the IO that I need
running over a single cable with all the heat and noise
of my gaming rig in another room altogether.
And it worked really well
until a couple of things happened.
First, I wanted to upgrade my machine
and Thunderbolt 2 isn't really a thing anymore.
And second, every single one
of my First Gen Thunderbolt 2 cables died
due to what was apparently
a fairly widespread overheating issue.
A cable that overheats!
As it turns out, that's just one of the many reasons
this thing took years to develop.
Another, is that it took many, many months
to get the firmware just so
to appease the Intel certification gods
and okay, hold on a second!
We got overheating.
We got certification.
What kind of electrical cable is this?
I'm glad you asked because it's not one,
it's a fiber optic cable.
Now most optical cables contain one or two strands
of fiber optic filament, but this one has six.
Each of them is just
one quarter of a millimeter in diameter
with a glass center that is just
one eighth of a millimeter
and then a core, where the light actually travels,
that is less than half of that again.
Fibers like this are used in many data centers
and can transmit 20 Gigabit per second.
So then, one pair in here transmits 40 Gigabit per second.
Another pair receives 40 Gigabit per second.
And the remaining pair
carries lower bandwidth control signals
between the two ends of the cable.
All of this is done internally
and to the devices on either side,
it appears as a completely normal Thunderbolt connection,
no drivers required.
That is why it needs this.
Yes, my friends!
We cut a a $400 cable to show you this.
Packed inside each of the connector ends
is a tiny little circuit board
containing the components that take an electrical signal
convert it to an optical signal,
transmit it over each fiber,
and then convert it again at the other end.
Each connector contains three VCSELs
or Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers,
a type of light source
that's common in fiber optic networking
because it's narrow beam and fast switching speed
offers superior performance and range compared to LEDs,
but at a lower cost than full fat laser emitters.
There are also three photo diodes
which are the detectors that receive these laser signals
along with chips to control the laser timings
and to receive the photo diode signals
and turn them back into electrical ones.
You can actually see that Corning
has put a lot of work into designing the strain relief
that protects the optical fibers
and bonds the circuit board to the cable.
Okay, the thing is glass fiber is, well, it's glass
and it needs to be treated with a bit more respect
than copper in order to avoid breakage.
You guys might actually remember
when we fiber optics my house
and Colin accidentally broke one of the fibers
as we were running it through the attic
and we had to run out and replace it.
That was an adventure by the way,
definitely check out that video if you haven't seen it.
With all that said though,
Corning claims that this
is one of the most durable cables they have ever made,
which naturally means that I want to test it.
We'll just plug into our Thunderbolt port here
and then, type C, type C.
This dock should not work!
Okay, just because Thunderbolt and USB
and Display port for that matter,
can use this same type C connector
doesn't mean that every port and every dock
and every cable can actually carry all of those signals.
And in fact, this cable can only carry a Thunderbolt signal.
So, no problem.
Let's go ahead and plug in this Thunderbolt SSD then.
No!
Right, okay.
This is an optical cable.
What can we not transmit over fiber optics,
power.
Ha!
One moment please.
- [Colin] Here you go. Just at it. Just at it.
- Now, we can do our durability test.
That's looking good.
Getting speeds of 200, 300, 400.
500, Nope!
400 megabytes a second.
And if Corning is to be believed,
we can do crazy stuff
like tie this thing in a fricking knot and wrench on it
and it shouldn't stop transferring.
(laughing)
Okay, I mean that's glass, but apparently it's,
pretty like rugged glass,
more knots, we're getting knotty here.
You wanna get knotty?
Let's do it again.
Copy here.
I mean,
(laughing)
- [Colin] We could try and skip rope with it.
- I'm sure we could, at this point.
Look at this.
This is crazy.
- [Colin] That poor glass.
- Easy peasy.
And one more thing.
Remember how I said the cable can't carry Display port.
It only carries Thunderbolt.
Well, Thunderbolt can carry a Display port signal.
You just need a dock that is able to split it out.
So, we've got our dock,
we've got display port
and da ta da!
There it is.
So you've got your Display port, your Thunderbolt, your USB,
your Ethernet, whatever else it is that you need.
And the really truly mind blowing thing here
is that for the laser light to be transmitted,
the fiber in each of these cables has to be prepared exactly
like the polymer coating on each fiber
has to be removed, precisely cleaved
then the fiber has to be perfectly aligned
and secured to its assigned laser or photo diode
within 10 micrometers of tolerance.
And much of this fiber handling work
is performed in a clean room
by hand and is super labor intensive.
That is why they cost so much.
But the thing is copper Thunderbolt 3 cables,
like this one,
can only reach a maximum of three meters
before the signal degrades too much.
So while these are cheaper,
for certain applications this is just the only way to do it.
But, how well does it work?
Okay, hold on.
I've actually got something perfect to test this.
Where did we put it?
Nope.
Oh, hey, there it is.
Check this out.
This is a Aorus's water-cooled RTX 3080.
That comes in an external Thunderbolt enclosure.
So,
wow, this thing is really big.
Ha ha, that's okay, because let's say,
"Oh no, I don't have anywhere to put it.
Where on earth will I put it?"
Hi.
We'll find somewhere else.
And I'll connect it with this guy.
Here we go.
Do to do, to do, a do do to!
Where am I going to put my graphics card?
I could put it at Madison's desk.
I could take it down the stairs
or I could go over to the Accounting department.
I can put it in Yvonne's office.
- [Yvonne] What are you doing?
- I'm just running a cable.
This isn't really far enough to do my demo though.
I've still got a lot left on the spool.
So see you later.
I could go to Colton's office.
Does he still work here yet?
Yep, turns out he does.
All good, don't worry about it, Colton.
I'm going to go over to the creator warehouse.
I'm going to see all the prototype merch.
We're going to go down to logistics.
Wow! 50 meters is actually really, really far.
Now, we're down in logistics.
And we still got cable left.
Oh, this is perfect.
We can put it on top of this server rack.
Brilliant, I just have to go get the GPU.
I forgot to bring it.
Oh you!
Wow!
What a beast!
Thanks Colin.
Now, we just got to hope nobody trips over this
and like pulls it off the desk.
Go, go, go back.
Interestingly, the maximum length of this cable
isn't limited by the fiber itself
but rather by Thunderbolt's timing requirements.
So it takes around 0.25 microseconds for light
to travel 50 meters in an optical fiber.
So due to the 0.5 microsecond roundtrip signal time,
the size of thunderbolts buffer registers
and some timings to find in the PCI express specification,
performance starts to degrade
or you can get weird behavior after 50 meters.
Now, the thing is we're hooking up a GPU here
but it could actually be any Thunderbolt device.
You could even daisy-chain multiple 4K monitors
or hide your storage drive away, somewhere theft resistant,
or put a dock somewhere far away from your PC.
Like I do at home to isolate the noise and the heat.
All right, let's go ahead and launch a game.
What do you think?
And that is definitely
not running on the integrated graphics.
I mean, to be clear,
this XPS 15 has a very respectable RTX 2060 in it,
but this is shadow of the Tomb Raider running at 4K,
absolutely maxed out
(chuckles) and we are getting significantly better numbers.
34. Okay.
- [Colin] The 3080 should be able to do more than that?
- Yeah.
Okay.
So, that's the thing,
maybe a PCI Express 4x interface
shouldn't have such a powerful graphics card on it
but at least the cable is holding up just fine
since no one has tripped over it yet.
And oh, another thing to note
is that this config isn't optimal either
because some of the cable's bandwidth
is being used to bring the image
back from eGPU to this display.
So we would actually see a definite improvement
if we were to plug directly
into our eGPU for the display output
but then I couldn't just go put it wherever,
I would have to put it where I actually wanna game
and I would just be able to put the computer wherever.
Anyway, long range high-speed connections
for consumer level hardware
isn't even the coolest thing about these.
Say for example, you needed to run along power lines.
I neglected to mention that because these are,
it's right, fiber optic
and there's no metal elements within the cables.
They're impervious to electromagnetic interference.
So you could actually use something
like this to run data somewhere you normally couldn't,
like an MRI, for instance.
Neat, huh?
It all comes at a cost, of course though.
So the 165 foot or 50 meter one runs just shy
of 480 US Dollars.
While the shortest length of five meter cable
is still a wallet puckering $360
which goes to show you that the cost
is in the manual assembly of the ends
and not in the actual, you know,
glass that's running between them.
Of course, if you have a specific use case like I do
at least it's there as a solution to a problem
that otherwise we would have no way to solve.
And I'm glad that someone
went through it all the trouble to make it.
So thanks Corning.
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Did you tie this up more?
Oh, well that's it for this (chuckles) episode
if you're keen on cable related matters,
we've got an upcoming video
that asks the question and answers it.
Does cable length really matter?
Keep your eyes peeled for that in the near future.
Bye. Oh, actually wait.
No, you wanna get knotty?