USB 3.1 type C, what is it?

Is it thunderbolt, or it something else, I know its going to be used as a protocol for inter connectivity. Sorry for the noob question.

 

USB 3.1 Type C is actually two different technologies / standards that came out at about the same time.

Let's take a step back, and see why USB 3.1 Type C even exists. If you look at typical USB 3.0, there are two problems with it:

1) Speed is a bottleneck. Especially with fast devices like external SSD drives.

2). The cable is a pain-in-the-butt, because it's a rectangular plug that only inserts one way.




So the USB standards group wanted to solve those two problems.

Speed is solved by USB 3.1. that standard increases bandwidth.

Type C is just a new USB plug / connector shape. It's a reversible cable (like an Apple Lightning cable), so you never need to worry about inserting the cable plug in the wrong way.

They are two separate standarda. You can have USB 3.1 and not use Type C cables... Those USB 3.1 ports just use the typical USB plug shape (Type A).

You can also have USB Type C cables, but not have USB 3.1. You will see this on high-end Android smartphones released in the past 6-9 months. Those phones might use USB Type C cables, but they transfer data at USB 2.0 or 3.0 speeds.

USB 3.1 Type C rolls all of that up together. That phrase tells me: buy this, and you dont need to worry about speed (USB 3.1), or having to deal with plugging the cable in the wrong way (Type C).


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BTW, Thudnerbolt 3 is a completely different connector standard. It uses a totally different controller chip on your computer motherboard (or add-in card). It was designed to do a few things:

1) Speed. Historically, the most-recent revision of Thunderbolt was always faster than the most-recent revision of USB (either USB 3.0, or now USB 3.1).
2) Thunderbolt carries DisplayPort signals, so you can plug a monitor in to it.
3) Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained. So even if you only have one Thunderbolt port on your motherboard, you can still connect multiple devices through daisy-chain.
4) Thunderbolt carries USB signals, so you could connect USB devices to it.
5) Thunderbolt carries PCIe signals. So with the right cables, adapters, etc, you could connect a traditional PCIe device to a laptop through Thunderbolt 3 (such as PCIe graphics cards, RAID cards, video capture / compression add-in cards, etc).

Thunderbolt 3 happens to use the USB Type-C connector, for simplicity. And those cables are interchangeable. So a Thunderbolt 3 cable (which uses Type-C connectors) can be used on a USB 3.1 port. And a regular USB 3.1 Type-C cable can be used on Thunderbolt 3 as a Thunderbolt cable.