The reason here is the required certification with Intel. The moment PCIe enters the picture, prices go up. Notably these do not do anything with the PCI Express signals. The cheapest Thunderbolt 3 devices I am aware of are the TB3 to dual DP for $80. I challenge you to show me anything that is not USB C but Thunderbolt 3 and is 50$. In other words, what's with PCI-e that is so much more difficult to implement than all these other protocols? At least that's the impression i'm having, sorry if i'm missing something obvious.Īlso found this spec page for a thunderbolt 3 controller from intel which is supposed to cost 10$, not sure if related to the topic at hand: It's a bit like saying 'I don't want a full, expensive ring, I just want that diamond from it!".ĭo you have a source on why is that the case and what technical difficulties exist? There's T3 dongles and adapters that go for 50$ or less with any combination of i/o like Ethernet, USB, audio, Display Port, HDMI, Sata, SD cards. The enclosures are (unfortunately) for now more like added value than the real source of the high prices. For the previous 110$ example - if I added a box, a PSU, cables etc, the cost would be 200$ - while still expensive, now the R&D cost is just ~50% of the unit price, as opposed to the original 90%+ of the original example.Įnclosures are expensive because (low series) TB3 to full-size PCI-e boards are expensive (and hard to do right). There are two ways around this - economy of scale (if you sold 100.000 boards instead of 1.000, that's just 1$ per board), and bundling components so the cost is spread. (I take "pfft, I can build a space ship for that amount" comments only from people who have actually launched consumer electronics devices in the EU/US ). And while 100.000$ seems like a lot of money, it's actually a very optimistic estimate given the complexity of what needs to be done. In other words, if you spent 100.000$ on development (prototypes, testing, certification, salaries, licenses) and you make 1.000 boxes, just that cost *alone* will be 100$ per unit (so if all your cost was just that controller, you'd be charging 110$ for a product with that 10$ component). Part costs are very misleading because they don't include the NRE (non-recurring engineering, or R&D) cost. To make it even worse, GPU is very latency/bandwidth sensitive, and requires a different certification path to a simple TB3 device (the cost is not in the certification itself, but making sure you're compliant in all required areas). In reality, there are silicon errors, firmware errors, incompatibilities and tons of workarounds to accommodate them. On paper, this is super easy, everything "just works" and everything is compatible. On the first part, you're creating a single purpose device - whereas with a general PCIe bridge you need to be compatible with ALL possible devices (AND combinations thereof).