It's not just the controllers; the Thunderbolt protocol itself imposes different speed limits. The bit rates used by Thunderbolt aren't the same as PCIe, and PCIe traffic gets encapsulated in Thunderbolt packets.
replyApple Silicon has an integrated thunderbolt controller so that should have less latency than PCs that use a discrete thunderbolt controller.
replyMany recent laptop CPUs from Intel and AMD have integrated Thunderbolt controllers (i.e. USB 4), so that has not been a difference for a long time.
replyMaybe; I'm unable to find any benchmarks that specifically compare PCs with TB to Macs to test this. But there is certainly still overhead with TB no matter what, and therefore it'll never be as fast as Oculink.
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