Back in August of 2021, just over two years ago, we learned the first details of Intel's Thunderbolt 5 when the company itself inadvertently leaked the details of it. At the time, the company was showcasing its 80G PHY technology which indicated that the tech giant was looking at doubling the throughput of Thunderbolt 5 compared to what we currently have with Thunderbolt 4, i.e., from 40Gbps to 80Gbps.
However, it looks like things are looking better than they were back then. A new leak reported by VideoCardz shows that Intel's Thunderbolt 5 is apparently taking things up a notch with the upcoming technology offering up to 120Gbps of bandwidth with a "Bandwidth Boost" feature. This is a massive gain compared to both Thunderbolt 3 as well as Thunderbolt 4 as both were 40Gbps.
The leaked presentation slides below demonstrate Intel's idea of what the Bandwidth Boost can do.
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Essentially, while the bi-directional throughput of Thunderbolt 5 will be 80Gbps, the Bandwidth Boost technology will be able to limit the unidirectional throughput on a single lane (receive) to 40Gbps such that the remaining three lanes will be able to offer 120Gbps of speed (transmit) and it is reserved for higher bandwidth display needs.
Among the other features that Thunderbolt 5 brings is 240W charging for laptops and notebooks. Hence, for many such devices, this will be a nice option to have aside from the proprietary chargers. PCIe bandwidth has also been raised to 64Gbps which means there shouldn't be much bottlenecking for powerful graphics cards connected via eGPU (external GPU) docks as it is built on PCIe Gen4.
The image below shows the compatibility of Thunderbolt 5:
Finally, the two images below summarize the features and specifications of Thunderbolt 5:
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The technology will work with USB3 20G as well as the newish USB4 version 2 (USB 80G).
Via: VideoCardz
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