A prominent hardware leaker has alleged that while Thunderbolt 4 will come as standard for Intel Core Ultra 200 CPUs on Z890, that the upcoming CPU generation will miss out on Thunderbolt 5.
NO THUNDERBOLT 5.0 for Intel’s incoming Z890 chipset according to Golden Pig Upgrade, the hardware tech leaker. The Intel Arrow Lake will remain with the 40 Gbps Thunderbol 4.0, and will miss the 80 Gbps Thunderebolt 5.0 long awaited upgrade.
A move that AMD might very well try to exploit and feature on its incoming generation of boards and processors in order to get a competitive edge on Intel. Something AMD has been brilliantly doing in the past year, by being the first to roll out new standards such as PCIe 4.0 or a wider adoption of the PCIe 5.0 standard.
As a frame of reference, both Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 are capped at 40 Gbps which means there’s no great increase in the two technologies despite their seven-year age gap. In contrast, Thunderbolt 5 can achieve double this at 80 Gbps which can be increased to 120 Gbps through Bandwidth Boost.
Also alleged by Golden Pig Upgrade is that Ultra Core 200 CPUs will feature just four Xe cores baked onto the chip which is half of what’s currently available through Meteor Lake for laptops. Probably the result of Intel observing that users, in they very large majority, did couple their CPUs with a dedicate GPU anyways.
We can take the alleged specs for the Arrow Lake flagship as a point of comparison. It’s believed that the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K will feature 24 cores and 24 threads with a maximum boost clock of up to 5.5 GHz and a 125W TDP. In contrast, the current-generation Intel Core i9-14900K features 24 cores and 32 threads up to 6 GHz. It’s certainly a different approach moving to Disaggregated architecture from Hybrid.
What does it mean for ARROW LAKE future?
In short, Intel runs the risk to portray the incoming ARROW LAKE powered familiy of processors, to be lighter incremental upgrade compared to the current 14th Gen of Intel Core CPUs than anticipated.
It also means that, in order to see THUNDERBOLT 5 on Intel ran machines, we would have to wait the rolling out of Lunar Lake in laptops and Panther Lake in desktops.
Noticeable upgrade since the new standard would imply not only increased bandwidth for external GPUs and SSDs but also boosting higher resolutions and framerates of up to 540Hz and enhanced multi-monitor in 4K and 8K (via Intel).