M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro Models Likely to Feature Thunderbolt 5

[springsup]

what do you guys use this speed for?

I plug my laptop in to a dock when it’s at my desk. I have a 4K 120Hz monitor attached, and gigabit Ethernet, audio, and a SSD drive.

Thunderbolt 3 and 4 support up to 40Gb/s.

The monitor alone takes 25Gb/s. That leaves 15 for everything else. Internally, the hub is going to split that up for the various components - maybe 5Gb/s for the Ethernet and audio, and one 10Gb/s USB port for the SSD.

A good quality SSD can do 7450MB/s, or around 60Gb/s. That means you’re only getting about 1/6 the performance that it could deliver.

Thunderbolt 5 increases the bandwidth to 80Gb/s. This isn’t a crazy complex setup, but I’ll be able to eat all of that extra bandwidth and it will still be the bottleneck.

And yes, my SSD going from 10Gb/s to 50Gb/s (5x faster) will be noticeable. Especially if you work on projects with large files, that’s a significant increase.

 

[Crzyrio]

I plug my laptop in to a dock when it’s at my desk. I have a 4K 120Hz monitor attached, and gigabit Ethernet, audio, and a SSD drive.

Thunderbolt 3 and 4 support up to 40Gb/s.

The monitor alone takes 25Gb/s. That leaves 15 for everything else. Internally, the hub is going to split that up for the various components - maybe 5Gb/s for the Ethernet and audio, and one 10Gb/s USB port for the SSD.

A good quality SSD can do 7450MB/s, or around 60Gb/s. That means you’re only getting about 1/6 the performance that it could deliver.

Thunderbolt 5 increases the bandwidth to 80Gb/s. This isn’t a crazy complex setup, but I’ll be able to eat all of that extra bandwidth and it will still be the bottleneck.

And yes, my SSD going from 10Gb/s to 50Gb/s (5x faster) will be noticeable. Especially if you work on projects with large files, that’s a significant increase.

New SSD's are also hitting 12500MB/s +. Can easily expect an SSD able to saturate thunderbolt 5 connection with no problem in the coming years.

 

[teh_hunterer]

Great question
It seems like people just want Thunderbolt 5 because 5 > 4

You don't know what you're talking about. HDMI 2.1 is already 48gbps. Try running two of those over Thunderbolt 4 and let me know how you go.

 

[Tagbert]

Great question
It seems like people just want Thunderbolt 5 because 5 > 4

One reason would be driving a 5K or similar monitor that has USB ports on it. With TB3/4 those ports would be limited to USB 2 speeds. With TB 5, there is enough bandwidth for USB 3+ speeds.