alt Hacker NewsBlog post for people who prefer reading: https://hackaday.com/2026/04/11/implementing-pcie-over-fiber...
While at a higher level, thunderbolt and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpEther can both of course work over fiber too!
(Q|O)SFP are basically just raw high speed serial interfaces to whatever - you see this a lot in FPGAs, you can use the QSFP interfaces for anything high speed - PCIe, SATA, HDMI…
> Although we can already buy commercial transceiver solutions that allow us to use PCIe devices like GPUs outside of a PC, these use an encapsulating protocol like Thunderbolt rather than straight PCIe.
> [snip]
> As explained in the intro, this doesn’t come without a host of compatibility issues, least of all PCIe device detection, side-channel clocking and for PCIe Gen 3 its equalization training feature that falls flat if you try to send it over an SFP link.
So, uh… what’s the benefit? How much overhead does Thunderbolt really introduce, given it solves these other issues?