Intel Just Showed How Powerful Thunderbolt 5 Really Can Be

Bryant tweeted since-deleted photos of Israel’s Thunderbolt laboratory. These photos revealed some technical details about how Intel achieves double bandwidth (and therefore 80 Gbps) through Pulse Amplitude Modulation.

This speed is comparable to USB4 Version 2.0, which was recently announced. It also achieves 80Gbps in a dual-link mode. Both standards are USB-C connectors, and they have more or less equal feature parity. It will be interesting to see how Intel differentiates Thunderbolt 5.

Thunderbolt 4 was released in 2020 and offered many improvements over Thunderbolt 3.

These include support for multiple 4K displays as well as increased PCIe bandwidth. Thunderbolt has been vital in high bandwidth transfer that has allowed everything from external storage to GPUs. Thunderbolt ports are a common feature on most computers, especially laptops, released in recent years. This includes Macs with Apple Silicon.

Ironically, USB4 is derived from Thunderbolt 3. This donation was made to the USB Implementers Forum. It’ll be fascinating to see how future devices will implement both Thunderbolt 5 and USB 4.

Although Intel has not yet set a release date for Thunderbolt 5, it is expected to launch sometime this year.