Intel highlighted the Thunderbolt’s future, which might lead to significant improvements in displays and performance. The prototype has twice as much total bandwidth as Thunderbolt 4 (80 Gbps), and it can deliver up to three times as much bandwidth (120 Gbps) for video-intensive applications. In contrast, Thunderbolt 4 can only deliver a maximum of 40 Gbps. Additionally, the new Thunderbolt supports DisplayPort 2.1 and is backward compatible with earlier Thunderbolt and USB versions.

Only a few short years ago, in 2020, Thunderbolt 4 was announced and released. According to Intel, more information about Thunderbolt 4’s successor, including the name, features, and capabilities, will be disclosed in 2023. However, during the past few generations, Thunderbolt’s progress has accelerated, which is good news for individuals with high display requirements, like photographers, digital artists, and gamers. As more games and graphics cards support 4K ray tracing, a technically challenging lighting simulation, and push for faster frame rates, the advancement of photography specifications isn’t slowing down any time soon.

In practice, this can make exporting and rendering images faster and enable the best monitors to perform to their fullest capacity. Naturally, that still requires ports with the necessary bandwidth, such as the USB4. As an illustration, all of Apple’s laptops with the M1 and M2 CPUs include USB4 Thunderbolt ports.

“Intel has always been the industry pioneer and leader for wired connectivity solutions, and Thunderbolt is now the mainstream port on mobile PCs and integrated into three generations of Intel mobile CPUs,” says Intel’s client connectivity division general manager Jason Ziller. “We’re very excited to lead the industry forward with the next generation of Thunderbolt built on the USB4 v2 specification, advanced to this next generation by Intel and other USB Promoter Group members.”