It’s official: The next-generation Thunderbolt spec, called Thunderbolt 5, will debut 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 80Gbps 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 120Gbps 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 or some other platform. Thunderbolt 4 and 5 will coexist for some time, though, Intel said, eventually giving way to the updated spec.
