MacOS has supported RDMA over thunderbolt since March 19th.
I do wonder what Apple's custom-built servers are running for networking. I wish they still made Mac Pro-level chassis specifically for better IO. Thunderbolt 5 is nice, but far inferior to a PCIe x16 slot (which can hit 400 Gbps networking) nowadays.
The perf is amazing
His iperf3 results show that it's able to go full beans on a single 25g port. A cross platform SMB file copy is kind of a meaningless benchmark in this context.
IMO a pretty cool product would be a network switch providing native thunderbolt interfaces to multiple upstream hosts. That wouldn't magically fix this RDMA issue, though. This is just a separate thought. Seems like the kind of thing Mikrotik should make.
I found that SMB on macOS is just bad. If I try to heavily load it (e.g. by doing mass conversions in my Audible library), it can cause stalls and disconnections.
I managed to find a set of parameters (in /etc/nsmbd.conf) that makes it work more-or-less reliably by trial-and-error: dir_cache_off=yes, file_ids_off=yes, notify_off=yes, mc_on=no.
It's still terrible, though. It's so bad that Linux in a Parallels VM works _better_.
you can look up the rated power use of a connectx4 card, they do a lot of offloaded computation, too
See also NVMe drives? They draw enough idle power to drain a laptop battery overnight, and will easily hit 60+C in a bad enclosure. That’s only a 10Gbps module. The USB4 enclosures are all heatsink.
And your computer already speaks the PCIe and thunderbolt. It has that probably on CPU. Here we have to receive USB, convert it to Ethernet. On much less up to date process nodes than your CPU.
Third, until very recently for even 10Gbit it meant using a usb4<->pcie bridge chip which itself was hot, to provide a generic pcie connection, which then talked to a conventional network chip, so it was a double hop: USB <-> pcie <-> nic. I don't know if 25Gbit to USB direct convert is available yet but we've seen a wave of vastly cheaper 10Gbit adapters come out that are single chip USB<->nic, probably not pcie at all, that are much much cooler. 25Gbit is probably still not here yet, maybe?
With ethernet it's for lots of reasons but a big one is not creating ground loops between distant equipment. If you didn't isolate the network cable would be sinking potentially amps of current between distant devices and that just isn't sustainable. You don't have this problem attaching USB between two devices.
Author talks about 4k video, but AI tells me that for "4K production mastering (ProRes 422 HQ, 4:2:2, 10-bit)" the rate is under 2Gbps.
I'm not saying it's not needed, - just curious.
Edit: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...
Obviously it's possible to move this to a NAS, not use a mac, etc. etc. - but just wanted to chime in with my little use case of moving multi-gig-files around. :-)
I was just looking for a thunderbolt-sfp solution. Super timely!
That'd be the rate for 1 stream at 1x playback. Multiple streams because of overlays/crossfades/etc... along with playback at >1x (such as during rendering in particular) will change that significantly.
I'm in a never-ending pursuit of cutting time when transferring large files though — AI models is one thing, but I have 100-200 GB projects I transfer across for backup or import (using an external TB5 drive capable of 3-5 GB/sec), and if I can do that in 1 or 2 minutes per project instead of 3 or 4, that's a noticeable speedup.
Definitely overkill for 98% of my workflow though. 10 Gbps is fine.
So for instance you have two or more machines that have USB 4 ports at 20 to 80 Gbps and you plug in the appropriate USB C cables to connect them.
What do you need to make the connections appear as a (point to point) part of a regular TCP/IP network? Seems much cheaper than Ethernet if you already have the ports.
Latency was an order of magnitude higher than twisted pair but the throughput was greater than 10Gbps and I didn’t have to spend on 10GbE capable servers and network equipment. I vaguely remember that they had to be proper Thunderbolt not just USB-C but that could have changed it’s been quite a while.
I believe MacOS supports it via the usual network control panel. I’ve used it for transferring data from an older laptop to a newer one. The cable is more expensive than fiber, last time I checked.
But for all certified Thunderbolt 4 and 5 ports, this kind of networking support is a requirement. (It is optional with Thunderbolt 3.)
The rest is up to the operating system.
> this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores). I was testing writing to an array of fast enterprise NVMe SSDs, so they shouldn't be the bottleneck here.
He was only getting 1 Gigabyte of throughput out of the built in 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection and moving to the 25 Gigabit connection only made a marginal impact, after all.