It’s official: the next-generation Thunderbolt spec will be called Thunderbolt 5, debuting next year with enough charging power and bandwidth to support eGPUs and a new class of ‘external AI devices’.
Intel teased the new Thunderbolt specification at the end of 2022, promising that the next-gen Thunderbolt would continue the trend of doubling bandwidth, all the way to 80Gb/s in one direction. That included a promise, now confirmed, that the four lanes of Thunderbolt could be reconfigured to allow three lanes from a laptop to a monitor, rather than two. That will allow the option of a 120Gb/s connection to a display, which Intel now refers to as Bandwidth Boost.
Thunderbolt 5 will eventually be integrated within Intel’s Core platforms, primarily laptops. Although Intel has a prototype dock and laptop that it will begin
