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A tweet from an Intel executive tweeted and then deleted an image that showed some details about the Thunderbolt 5 under development, including that Intel is aiming to double the existing Thunderbolt bandwidth limits to 80 Gbps.
Sunday morning Tweeter was published by executive vice president and general manager of Intel Client Computing Group, Gregory Bryant, sparked speculation about the future of Thunderbolt as a communications technology. The executive released a collection of four images from a visit to Intel’s research and development center in Israel, but quietly deleted one of the photographs.
Seen by Anandtech, the image has been deleted from Twitter because it includes a background poster that details what is believed to be Thunderbolt 5. The poster gives some key information about how the connection works, including that it is tentatively called “USB 80G”.
While he didn’t mark Thuderbolt on the poster at all, Bryan’s tweet mentions that it was a Thunderbolt-related lab visit. Additionally, given Thunderbolt’s proximity to Intel’s USB allowing the Thunderbolt 3 specification to become part of the USB 4 standard, it seems highly plausible that the poster is for Thunderbolt 5.
According to the poster in the image, the connection is “targeted to support the existing USB-C ecosystem,” meaning Intel plans to continue using the USB Type-C connection.
An unusual feature of the poster is the mention of its use of “new PAM-3 modulation technology”. This indicates that Intel wants to try a completely different bit transmission system than normal.
Normally, the data line transmits one bit at a time, with an electrical signal switching between two states, also known as NRZ encoding. An alternative, Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4 (PAM-4) mentions how two bits can be transferred at a time, with the 4 referring to the number of bit pairs it can produce.
PAM-3 differs in that a row of data can move between three states, spanning 0, +1, or a -1. A pair of transmissions tells the system what a group of three bits is, resulting in about 50% more efficiency than NRZ.
For consumers, Thunderbolt 5 should theoretically deliver many of the existing benefits of Thunderbolt 3, including power delivery, video, Thunderbolt networking, and high amounts of bandwidth. In the case of Thunderbolt 5, the doubled bandwidth from 40 Gbps to 80 Gbps will allow faster file transfers, as well as maintaining high data communications between connected devices with fewer limitations.
Current Apple products support Thunderbolt 3. Although some accessories have been released with Thunderbolt 4 support, it may take some time for Apple to upgrade to the standard.
It remains to be seen when Thunderbolt 5 is officially introduced, but the unexpected leak at least offers a glimpse of what to expect from the arrival of the standard.
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