The biggest thing I didn’t see at CES: Thunderbolt 5. Insiders explain why | usagoldmines.com

The one thing I expected to see at CES was a flood of laptops with Thunderbolt 5 connections attached. Yet, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t a single one.

Thunderbolt 4? Sure. Laptops with that specification were commonplace. But laptop makers don’t seem to be embracing Thunderbolt 5 yet, even though Intel officially announced the Thunderbolt 5 specification in late 2023 for shipment in 2024.

It’s now 2025, and Thunderbolt 5 was essentially a no-show at CES.

Why? From my conversations at the show, device makers blamed two things: first, the continued lack of Intel chipsets with integrated Thunderbolt 5 inside. But they also pointed to the stalled transition to 8K content. Without it, device makers say that consumers seem happy enough with the capabilities Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 provide.

Thunderbolt uses the USB-C port found on PCs, with Thunderbolt 4 routing up to 40 Gbps across it. Thunderbolt 5 can transmit up to 80Gbps (or, in certain cases, to 120Gbps) worth of data. That has typically translated into two 4K displays’ worth of data at 60Hz resolutions in the case of Thunderbolt 4, or three 4K displays at 144Hz, in the case of Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 also allows for two 8K displays at 60Hz.

And that’s the problem: the lack of 8K. Hardware makers describe it as a chicken-and-egg problem: Without 8K broadcast content, there isn’t a market for 8K displays. And without 8K displays, hardware capable of rendering 8K content just isn’t as valuable. Nvidia’s older GeForce 4090 cards supposedly can render and capture in 8K, but our review didn’t test that capability. Content creators can edit and export 8K video using the card, but 8K gaming is still more of a curiosity than a reality.

That’s not to say that there weren’t any Thunderbolt 5 devices at CES at all. LG launched a 6K display with a Thunderbolt 5 connection, Asus announced a Thunderbolt 5 eGPU, and LaCie launched Thunderbolt 5 SSDs. But LG’s display didn’t take advantage of Thunderbolt 5’s 8K capabilities, and anyone hoping to use the Asus eGPU needs a Thunderbolt 5 connection on their laptop, too.

Thunderbolt 5 requires an ecosystem, and there’s a gaping hole where the laptop is. Lousy early Thunderbolt 5 experiences haven’t helped.

Mark Hachman / IDG

It’s almost an economic problem

Bernie Thompson, the founder and chief technical officer at dock maker Plugable, said that the laptop dock industry has adapted to accommodate several trends. On one hand, technologies like Thunderbolt 4 and 5 supply increasing throughput. Technologies like Display Stream Compression use software compression to increase that data “supply” even further.

There should be a complementary “demand” element to it, too, but there isn’t. The hoped-for transition to 8K content is verging on its fifth year. And while there is a vociferous segment of the gaming audience who wants to push to higher refresh rates, a substantial chunk of the market — business users — don’t care about anything beyond standard 60Hz displays, he said.

“All of this is adding up to the headline feature of Thunderbolt 5 — the 80-120 [Gbps] support — solving a problem that is only a problem for a portion of the market, but probably not the majority of the market,” Thompson said. “And if Thunderbolt 5 were free, integrated in with the chipset and if it were completely devoid of any compatibility questions, then you would have a fast Thunderbolt 5 adoption. But I think that there are challenges in both areas.”

“And so the current 40-gig solutions like Thunderbolt 4, cover the scenarios that a high percentage of the market care about,” Thompson added.

Although some dock makers have released Thunderbolt 5 docking stations, others, like Plugable, don’t plan to release theirs until later this year.

Asus

Intel: Thunderbolt 4 is mainstream

Although Thunderbolt 5 is essentially the 80Gbps version of the industry-standard USB4 v2 (which is being branded as just “USB 80Gbps”), the Thunderbolt trademark is owned by Intel, which manufactures its own chipsets for PCs with Thunderbolt inside. At CES 2025, Intel launched the Core H and Core HX processors based upon its Arrow Lake desktop chips — and like its predecessors, these chips integrate Thunderbolt 4, not 5. (Intel provides a discrete Thunderbolt 5 chip that laptop makers can optionally buy and fit into laptops.)

An Intel representative described Thunderbolt 4 as the “mainstream port” right now.

“Thunderbolt 4 has become the mainstream port of choice on Intel Core-based laptops since it was integrated into the [chip] with our Intel Core 11th-gen mobile platform,” the Intel representative said via email, after the original publication of this story. “And now that it’s integrated on desktop platforms with our Intel Core Ultra 200S series processors you’re seeing some exciting product announcements from OEM partners like ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte.

“Thunderbolt 5 adoption continues to grow – both on mobile and desktop platforms – and we expect that momentum to continue in 2025 and beyond,” the spokesman added. “You’re seeing more and more Thunderbolt 5 accessories coming to market – CES 2025 featured several announcements from IO Gear, CableMatters, and ASUS for example. And you’ll be hearing more in the months to come.”

“8K is not happening”

However, Abdul Ismail, the chief technical officer of the USB Implementor’s Forum (and a senior principal engineer for Intel), said his estimate was widespread USB 80Gbps / Thunderbolt 5 adoption was not until 2027 or so. He, too, used the chicken-and-egg metaphor.

“To me, that’s a chicken-and-egg thing,” he said during a CES meeting, noting that the average user doesn’t need Thunderbolt 5’s capabilities at this point in time. “The host guys are going to put it in because it’s going to become a checklist item at some point in time, right? But I think that it’s going to be two-year’s time that you’ll see it as a requirement to have 80 gigs.”

Thunderbolt’s chief competition agreed. While Thunderbolt is the foundation of the best Thunderbolt docks, the DisplayLink protocol powers the best DisplayLink docks. Executives at DisplayLink and Synaptics, its parent company, argue that DisplayLink can do more with less, via compression, than Thunderbolt can. But even they agree that the cable between devices is no longer the gating factor, whatever it is.

Mark Hachman / IDG

“So I guess up until this point, until Thunderbolt 5 and [DisplayPort] 2.1, the GPUs could generate more pixels than we could transport and the display could consume,” said Jeff Lukanc, senior director of product marketing of video interfaces at Synaptics. “But now with DP 2.1, and Thunderbolt, 5, the connection far exceeds the GPU. So you don’t need that much bang. I think the answer is, the link is now ahead of either end, and we’ve got a couple years before this big catch-up.”

According to Lukanc, display makers are not going to invest in making 8K displays smaller. “So if the 8K is going to be a four-foot display, and it’s not going to fit on your desk, 8K is not happening,” he said. “What is happening is refresh rate.”

From what his business customers have told him, Lukanc said, “I’ve been told to plan on 165Hz for the next five years” with 4K displays.

PC gaming, meanwhile, could set an accelerated pace toward 8K content, hauling a more widespread adoption of Thunderbolt 5 in its wake. A source at one gaming PC maker said that we should be measuring adoption by GPU generation first and foremost. The Nvidia GeForce 30-series ushered in 4K gaming, but it was only in the 40-series where 4K gaming became more consistent, at 144Hz refresh rates.

For 8K? “If I had to guess, I’d say the [GeForce] 60, 70 series,” the source said. “Yeah, I think we’ll see early adoption in the 60 series, and 70 is where we’ll see — I don’t want to say mainstream, but more people will utilize it. By the 80 [series], it’ll be cheaper, where actual people can actually utilize it.”

But for now, however, it appears that Thunderbolt 5 won’t arrive on your PC any time soon.

Correction: Bernie Thompson is the founder and chief technical officer at Plugable, not the CTO. This story was updated at 5:37 PM on Jan. 14 with additional comments from Intel.