Originally Posted By: peter
One thing which doesn't exist yet, which seems like it should, is "NUMA over Thunderbolt", where you dock your laptop to your desktop, and the laptop OS sees hotplug events for everything in the desktop from CPUs downwards, and executes as a single system image (using the better CPUs, GPUs and memory) for as long as you're docked, and then when you want to make a move again the undocking process sends hot-unplug events for all the desktop's peripherals again.

When I first read this, my mind wandered through so many possibilities, would be great to see this. GPUs are so close with how they handle TB3 eGPU boxes or situations like the Surface Book and it’s power base with a discreet GPU. Starting to look into some RDMA tech coming into the commodity server space which also has me excited for the possibilities there.


On the TB3 dock side, awaiting delivery of what I finally settled on. NBaseT is too new and pricy at a few hundred still for TB3-NBaseT NICs, which explains why no docks offer it yet. There’s still a mess in the market where many docks only supply 60W of power to the notebook, instead of 87W. Though for my personal non work needs, 60W is plenty. Odds are the partners next notebook will be a 13 inch MBP as well. With all that factored in, I considered I wanted more then 2 USB ports, a Mac compatible dock, and solid chipsets for driver support in Windows. USB-C wth a 3.1 gen 2 port on the dock would be nice beyond the outbound TB3 port but wasn’t mandatory.

Went with another Mac brand with the OWC TB3 Dock. I figure with the mDP out, FW800, and SP/DIF for possible future use with my Sonos PlayBASE, it was a good fit. It’ll serve as a good legacy device, letting me still read from older Macs in target disk mode over FW400/800, or TB1-3. All without having to keep as many adapters on hand. Or needing to drag out the Thunderbolt monitor I’m pondering selling, as it’s less useful then the same display with mDP.

Down the road, I can reevaluate my desktop computing needs, and my network situation. Still need to replace the NAS first, and the SATA SSDs I still have can work via USB 3.1 Gen 1 for now via a cheap dock into the TB3 dock. Long term I’d like to move to higher then 1gbit LAN speeds and SSDs in the NAS for caching/taking large copies before migrating the data to spinning disks that can sleep most of the day.