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Intel IT

Intel Unveils Thunderbolt 5 Standard for High-Speed Connectivity (venturebeat.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the need-for-speed dept.
Intel has unveiled Thunderbolt 5, the latest iteration of its a standard aimed at enabling super-fast connectivity. From a report: With Thunderbolt 5, Intel promises a significant leap in connectivity speed and bandwidth, delivering enhanced performance for computer users. The unveiling of a prototype laptop and dock accompanied the announcement, providing a glimpse into the future of Thunderbolt technology.

Thunderbolt 5 will offer an impressive 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, enabling lightning-fast data transfer and connectivity. Additionally, with the introduction of Bandwidth Boost, Thunderbolt 5 will reach up to 120 Gbps, ensuring an unparalleled display experience for users. These advancements represent two to three times more bandwidth than Thunderbolt 4. And it can deliver up to 240 watts of power.
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Intel Unveils Thunderbolt 5 Standard for High-Speed Connectivity More

Intel Unveils Thunderbolt 5 Standard for High-Speed Connectivity

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  • Come on slashdot engineers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Tell me what this is lacking and what you (as an armchair engineer) would do differently.

    • It's not good enough for 16K video at 60p.

      • [sarcasm]Yes all those people who are using 16K monitors right now will have to wait until Thunderbolt 6 to come out. Also they will have to wait until 16K monitors to come out but that is just a minor technical detail.[/sarcasm]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Thunderbolt 5 sounds great, I just wish AMD would get USB 4.0 (which includes Thunderbolt) more widely deployed because it's 2023 and most AMD systems are still lacking it.

      • I just bought 2 gaming laptops and a docking stations with Thunderbolt 4, so I'd say it's deployed... I pay the extra money for Intel CPUs anyway. People don't realize that Intel does a better job of designing communications busses than chips; PCIe is the bast thing they've ever come up with, so no suprise they support USB 4.0 well.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I wonder if they will add support for a power button to Thunderbolt 5.

          One really annoying issue with Thunderbolt docks is that if they have a power button (to turn on the laptop without opening it, or reaching under the desk etc.) it is proprietary. Lenovo have their own, Dell have their own, HP have their own... There is no standard.

        • Note that AmiMoJo specifically called AMD out as who they wanted to more widely deploy Thunderbolt.

          Basically, it's like calling Toyota out for not including Android Auto support a few years ago*, wishing they had it on more models**, then you saying it's not a problem, your two trucks both have it - but you always buy Ford.

          *My car was the last model year that didn't have it, Toyota was lagging behind most car makers.
          **They upgraded some cars to be able to, but not my model...

      • The latest AMD laptops have USB 4.0 included in the chipset. These parts arrived after the Ryzen 7000 desktop parts which did not include USB 4.0. See here [pcworld.com].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Some of them do. Some Ryzen 7000 parts are actually the old 6000 parts with a new badge.

          They seem to be a bit limited though. I think their mobile parts don't have a lot of PCI-e lanes available, so they have to choose between more USB 4 ports and things like discrete graphics or two NVMe slots.

          When you compare the workstation class Intel and AMD machines in the same lineup (e.g. Thinkpads), the AMD ones seem to have less I/O.

          It's a shame we won't get 80GBps sooner for AMD either. With 4k displays a single

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        The USB4 standard does not include ThunderBolt as a standard. USB4 officially supports Thunderbolt 3 and is based on the Thunderbolt 3 protocol specification, it doesn't have the bandwidth or specs to encapsulate TB4 (although TB4 could run a USB4 controller)

        • False. Well the first sentence is true but all the others are false.
          USB4 does not officially support any Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt support is optional for USB4 hosts. USB4 *hubs* on the other hand have to support Thunderbolt 3.0 per specification but it still relies on Thunderbolt support on the host.
          USB4 is based on Thunderbolt 3 protocol but is aligned with Thunderbolt 4 in technical specs meaning that ultimately USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 have the same bandwidth, both support 40Gbps per lane, and USB4 Gen 4 m

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            Hence why I said "[the standard] of USB4 officially supports", a lot of things in USB4 are optional, but it will never support TB4. Other things that are optional on the host end is PCIe support, USB-C alternate modes and bandwidth above 20Gbps.

      • Thunderbolt 5 sounds great, I just wish AMD would get USB 4.0 (which includes Thunderbolt) more widely deployed because it's 2023 and most AMD systems are still lacking it.

        I hope they got permission from the EU for this. NOthing can happen without permission from the EU

    • Re:Come on slashdot engineers (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @10:31AM (#63841674) Homepage Journal

      They're still doing serial instead of parallel so it's only about a tenth the speed it could be, and even then, it still doesn't work with my 1541 drives. Fail!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by djb ( 19374 )

        They're still doing serial instead of parallel so it's only about a tenth the speed it could be, and even then, it still doesn't work with my 1541 drives. Fail!

        We gave up on parallel connections 40 years ago. The crosstalk interference between the lines at higher speeds means you have to slow everything down so much that serial ends up being the first option.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by clovis ( 4684 )

        They're still doing serial instead of parallel so it's only about a tenth the speed it could be, and even then, it still doesn't work with my 1541 drives. Fail!

        Braggart.. Not everyone could afford to hot-rod their Commodore that way.

        Back in my old days (early 1970's), the mainframes back then were made of single task IC's such as a flip-flop, a set of NAND gates and so on. Being 20 feet long, a signal took 20 nanoseconds to propagate from one end to the other, in the ideal case, not including delays within individual IC gates.
        So one of the first things we had to do when setting up a new box was tune the individual signals in a word-width bus (like from memory, the

    • Built-in fire suppression for when fake cables from Amazon are used.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        Built-in fire suppression for when fake cables from Amazon are used.

        You should use only Monster cables, especially if you require superluminal signal propagation

    • Tell me what this is lacking and what you (as an armchair engineer) would do differently.

      Wrap it in whatever viral license the FSF / RMS says such hardware should be licensed with, including any currently unknown future versions of that license. :-)

    • What it's lacking is a problem that people have for it to solve.
    • Make it so that it can be added to an existing system via an expansion card?

      I'd love to use Thunderbolt, but none of my current setups have the needed extra proprietary motherboard connectors required by the current crop of expansion cards.

  • Reliability (Score:4, Informative)

    by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @10:22AM (#63841638)

    Seems like Thunderbolt is the way forward, but, I have to say, since replacing all of our laptops and accompanying proprietary docks with USB-C/Thunderbolt, the reliability seems to have gone way down.

    Simple stuff like getting monitors to detect and USB-connected devices to work at all via the dock has become the new pain point in the IT department and it doesn't seem to be getting better with new Thunderbolt versions. All it really seems to be doing is ensuring that we make absolutely certain to stay locked in to a strict upgrade cycle to minimize the chance of version interoperability problems.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Some of it is the OS and drivers. Windows got an update that makes it handle Thunderbolt connected monitors better.

      • Yeah, to be fair, I don't know how much can actually be attributed to Thunderbolt per-se. I think some of it is driver and firmware versions, monitor connection types, processor models and Operating System.

        I am sure that it will all work itself out eventually, but we never had these issues in the past and so Thunderbolt is our new scapegoat ;)

      • I blame the cables. I have an LG Ultrafine 5k display and 2 different MacBook pros. When the cable that shipped started getting unreliable after 6 years, I bought a new one. I tried expensive thunderbolt3, reasonably priced thunderbolt4, expensive thunderbolt4, etc...major brands, unknown brands. I had to return like 10 different cables until I found an mid-priced no-name cable that was the same reliability as the OEM. So I am sure software/drivers play a role, but given you get a noticeably different
    • The cords are fussy but I've mixed and matched thunderbolt versions on docks with various laptops without any trouble... with the caveat I guess that all of these are HP so maybe they interoperate better than if I was mixing brands, too.

    • Re:Reliability (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @10:29AM (#63841664) Journal

      That hasn't been my experience supporting a mixed fleet of Windows (mostly Dell) and Apple laptops. We have had a few older Dell docks with stability issues, like monitors and other dock connected peripherals randomly disconnecting from the laptop, but thus far confined to old docks and presumably those specific units rather than something systemic.

      What's remarkable to me is how big of a mindset shift it has been for end users. I've had several lament the loss of the old proprietary docks you "popped" the laptop into. The experience today is the same, you just plug in a USB/ThunderBolt cable instead of popping into a dock, and now every desk in the organization is available to you (we're mostly hybrid/remote so very few folks have assigned desks) but it's still viewed as a net minus by some of our users. I just blame the supply chain and industry trends, lol.

      • I'm one of the users who lamented the loss of the old docks. The good thing about thunderbolt/USB-C docks is, as you said, they have great interoperability. The downside is that the implementations are all buggy. I've had plenty of USB docs that won't work until I reboot the laptop and the dock. Also the USB-C connector is terrible for docking. Sometimes the connector is inserted by the data lines aren't working so you get power but not data. Sometimes it's the opposite. You get data but not power and d

        • I've noticed a lot of lower-end USB-based self-described "docks" rely on DisplayLink for their multiple monitor support. DisplayLink is pretty ghetto and not particularly robust.

          • Very true, I have run into this many times. Basically if it's not *actually* Thunderbolt on both ends it has to be Displaylink which is compressed and also usually drops some frames in latency which makes it a pain (imo) for anything besides Powerpoint slides.

            If the dock is less than $100 it's almost for sure just a USB dock. Actual Thunderbolt docks ain't cheap as of yet.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shakrai ( 717556 )

          The old "snap in" connectors were nearly 100% reliable. USB-C is about 50% reliable in my personal experience and that's using docks from the same vendor as the laptops

          My experience is closer to 98% reliable and we do not have the luxury of mating dock vendor to laptop vendor. Apple has no official dock (side note: Every time I see some cheap Belkin accessory at an Apple Store I visualize Steve Jobs turning over in his grave), so there's that, yet they have rarely been a problem in our environment. I've had more issues with Dells connecting to Dell docks, but thus far at least, that seems confined to specific docks in our inventory rather than a whole model of dock or l

          • Dell/Dell combinations are over-represented in my samples which may explain the difference in our experiences!

    • I've only noticed that on very specific shitty hardware. Dell's laptop dock = Garbage, several others I've tried work flawlessly.

    • Personally, I have seen the problem as the firmware for these IT docks are buggy. My TB dock had a firmware update that could not be rolled back. Once I installed it, my dock had problems with supporting the same hardware as before reliably. Sometimes it supported my 2 monitors and sometimes it would not. I looked it up and it was a known issue. 6 months later they rolled out another firmware update that fixed everything—or reverted everything as it was before. YMMV

      • Was it a Lenovo Dock by chance? Our org is struggling w/ monitor issues, and the last hotfix addresses everything our sales rep said was "unheard of."

    • Simple stuff like getting monitors to detect and USB-connected devices to work at all via the dock has become the new pain point

      We, using HP, have found running the updates seems to resolve almost every single issue. Maybe it's strictly an HP issue, but at least a few minutes of updates and things are working.

      Of course the downside is this has to be done on every machine and even machines from the same order might have slightly different chips in them which means there's no one-size-fits-all sol

    • Simple stuff like getting monitors to detect and USB-connected devices to work at all via the dock has become the new pain point in the IT department and it doesn't seem to be getting better with new Thunderbolt versions.

      Has your department standardized on those Dell monitors that have a built-in dock, perchance? If that's the case, it's likely not Thunderbolt causing the issues...

  • I'm using TB4 capable HP Elitebook laptop which is connected via USB-C cable to Philips 5K2K UltraWide monitor. Monitor is connected to LAN with the Ethernet cable.
    Unfortunately the LAN connection which I got on laptop via the USB-C cable is unstable (it hangs few times per day) due to buggy Realtek USB GbE Family Controller driver in Windows 10. This is happening for all kinds of TB4 capable laptops regardless of what kind of external monitor or docking station is being used. It is just a crappy Realtek dr

  • I wonder why Intel announced this on the morning of an Apple product announcement day. Maybe Thunderbolt 5 over USB-C is coming to some iDevices as well?

  • also pci-e 4.0X4 is still low for an video card and that is with that being the only device on the bus

  • John Tracy says Thunderbolt 5 is Go

  • unless of course you use Pear oxygen free thunderbolt 5 cables.

  • Currently, TB3 is the basis of USB4, TB4 will probably be the basis for USB5 and TB5 will be the basis for USB6, so, do not think this is not relevant, or that it is relegated to some High-end model. It will catch up to us plebs eventually, so better familiarize with it sooner rather than later...

  • Isn't that a dead tech? Wasn't it a Crapple thing until they ditched it? Is it USB-C compatible?

    Why do we need something else??

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