Nearly a year after the official release of the Thunderbolt 5 standard, the first products to support it went on sale. Cable Matters has released the first Thunderbolt 5 cable, offering up to 120 Gbps of bandwidth. The manufacturer offers three sizes of cables: $0.3 for 22.99 m long, $0.5 for 26.99 m long, and $32.99 for 1 m long.
图片来源：Cable Matters
Because Thunderbolt 5 requires only one version of the specification, released cables support all the features of the standard, including up to 240 watts of power delivery, backward compatibility with Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3 Type-C (as well as USB4 and USB-Type-C) connectors, a bandwidth boost mode with a bandwidth of 120 Gbps, and bi-directional data transfer speeds of up to 80 Gbps.
Last year's Thunderbolt 5 standard was based on the USB4 version 2.0 specification and added several features that were unique to the Thunderbolt interface. These features include, in particular, the previously mentioned bandwidth boost mode with a bandwidth of 120 Gbps (USB4 version 2.0 has a maximum bandwidth of 80 Gbps). For Thunderbolt 5, this can be achieved by combining three 40 Gbps lanes in unidirectional transfer mode. Thunderbolt 5 also supports up to two 6K displays, up to three 4K displays with a 144Hz refresh rate, or two 8K displays with HDR support.
Enabling PCIe 4.0 support in Thunderbolt 5 means doubling the bandwidth (64 Gbps and 32 Gbps for Thunderbolt 5 and Thunderbolt 4) when connecting external PCIe devices such as SSDs and graphics cards. However, for this type of support to be fully implemented, systems with external graphics cards must have a PCIe bus capable of running at 64 Gbps.
Despite the fact that the first Thunderbolt 5 cables appeared on the market, you won't get much benefit from them. Simply because there are no computers or other products that can take advantage of the new standard. Even at the recent Computex 2024 electronics show, no Thunderbolt 5-enabled devices were announced. The first products to support the new standard will most likely wait until the end of this year or even next year.