by 0manrho | 2025-12-13 03:59:06+00:00
Just for reference:

Thunderbolt5's stated "80Gbps" bandwidth comes with some caveats. That's the figure for either Display Port bandwidth itself or in practice more often realized by combining the data channel (PCIe4x4 ~=64Gbps) with the display channels (=<80Gbps if used in concert with data channels), and potentially it can also do unidirectional 120Gbps of data for some display output scenarios.

If Apple's silicon follows spec, then that means you're most likely limited to PCIe4x4 ~=64Gbps bandwidth per TB port, with a slight latency hit due to the controller. That Latency hit is ItDepends(TM), but if not using any other IO on that controller/cable (such as display port), it's likely to be less than 15% overhead vs Native on average, but depending on drivers, firmware, configuration, usecase, cable length, and how apple implemented TB5, etc, exact figures very. And just like how 60FPS Average doesn't mean every frame is exactly 1/60th of a second long, it's entirely possible that individual packets or niche scenarios could see significantly more latency/overhead.

As a point of reference Nvidia RTX Pro (formerly known as quadro) workstation cards of Ada generation and older along with most modern consumer grahics cards are PCIe4 (or less, depending on how old we're talking), and the new RTX Pro Blackwell cards are PCIe5. Though comparing a Mac Studio M4 Max for example to an Nvidia GPU is akin to comparing Apples to Green Oranges

However, I mention the GPU's not just to recognize the 800lb AI compute gorilla in the room, but also that while it's possible to pool a pair of 24GB VRAM GPU's to achieve a 48GB VRAM pool between them (be it through a shared PCIe bus or over NVlink), the performance does not scale linearly due to PCIe/NVLinks limitations, to say nothing of the software, and configuration and optimization side of things also being a challenge to realizing max throughput in practice.

This is also just as true as a pair of TB5 equipped macs with 128GB of memory each using TB5 to achieve a 256GB Pool will take a substantial performance hit compared to on otherwise equivalent mac with 256GB. (capacities chosen are arbitrary to illustrate the point). The exact penalty really depends on usecase and how sensitive it is to the latency overhead of using TB5 as well as the bandwidth limitation.

It's also worth noting that it's not just entirely possible with RDMA solutions (no matter the specifics) to see worse performance than using a singular machine if you haven't properly optimized and configured things. This is not hating on the technology, but a warning from experience for people who may have never dabbled to not expect things to just "2x" or even just better than 1x performance just by simply stringing a cable between two devices.

All that said, glad to see this from Apple. Long overdue in my opinion as I doubt we'll see them implement an optical network port with anywhere near that bandwidth or RoCEv2 support, much less a expose a native (not via TB) PCIe port on anything that's a non-pro model.

EDIT: Note, many mac skus have multiple TB5 ports, but it's unclear to me what the underlying architecture/topology is there and thus can't speculate on what kind of overhead or total capacity any given device supports by attempting to use multiple TB links for more bandwidth/parallelism. If anyone's got an SoC diagram or similar refernce data that actually tells us how the TB controller(s) are uplinked to the rest of the SoC, I could go in more depth there. I'm not an Apple silicon/MacOS expert. I do however have lots of experience with RDMA/RoCE/IB clusters, NVMeoF deployments, SXM/NVlink'd devices and generally engineering low latency/high performance network fabrics for distributed compute and storage (primarily on the infrastructure/hardware/ops side than on the software side) so this is my general wheelhouse, but Apple has been a relatively blindspot for me due to their ecosystem generally lacking features/support for things like this.