It certainly doesn’t have the polish that comes with certified tb stuff, I’ll give you that.
I also thought I had a kernel bug there because it reported running at 1x but turns out I just performance tested wrong and single threaded dd was not able to fully load the link and when I retested I got numbers indicating full bandwidth anyway. Link reporting on usb4 is a bit weird rn.
That thing certainly feels more like a proof of concept than an actual product and I do hope a nicer one with 65 or 100W pd comes out at some point. Also don’t think the current asmedia chipsets support daisy chaining which was pretty neat on the TH3P4 but I am fine trading that for the extra usable bandwith.
Vendors lying about certification sucks but I doubt that’ll get fixed soon. Not sure what you mean by PR.
Parts of the connection are virtual. That is were I have seen “x1” links from Intel controllers and where it seems not to matter at all. But what is reported on the actually physical connection between TB/USB4 controller and PCIe equipment such as NVMe or GPU has been accurate in all cases. And bandwidth tests match, while TB3 equipment or TB4 equipment makes x4 connections on the same ports. So that is some kind of issue involving the ASM2464.
Sadly I do not know enough about debugging PCIe under Linux to find why it downgrades that, because it still reports the ports capabilities accurately.
Yeah. Not sure if no other manufacturer has brought a competitor because of the lack of PD support from the controller or because they have problems getting it to work for off-label use. (ASM2464PDX is supposed to allow external PD controllers to allow PD output. But we have not seen any in the wild yet).
It was specifically designed for NVMe enclosures. It is completely geared towards that. Including fully integrated handling of PD, which prevents any kind of PD power output etc. Adding a downstream USB4 port would just force them to add more capabilities like PCIe switch etc. that make it more complicated and make very little sense for the NVMe enclosure market.
Press Release. I do not doubt that they had there reference board certified. But if no manufacturer using the chip gets their product certified or provides a firmware update to achieve “TB4 certification” like Framework did for 12th gen, its not really useful. Because with the original firmware on my enclosure not even showing up in TB control center (my Anker 566 USB4 endpoint still does not), its probably not certifiable on any of the firmwares I have tried (basically all that I found starting with the October 23’ version.
So it either seems not easy to make that controller TB4-certifieable or there are other complications with it…
Interesting, while them having a reference board certified may not help you immediately it does prove that it is possible and their implementation is/can be complete and it’ll massively increase the probability of manufacturers using that chip attempting to get certified.
I’d say it’s probably not as hard as it is expensive and tedious.
If big laptop manufactures usually can’t be bothered to even use the tb4 ports that come for pretty much free (you do of course need a fancier re-driver and need to do more careful signal routing but it is certainly a lot cheaper than needing a separate controller for it), let alone certify it I doubt most nvme enclosure and especially egpu manufacturers will even attempt it, especially for very low volume and low margin stuff like ssd enclosures or diy egpus.