Getting excited about connection standards is not easy. Especially when there is already a universal standard. Intel is making the right claims about Thunderbolt, successfully getting motherboards and laptops with the latest chips to support Thunderbolt 3.

Somewhat surprisingly for a new standard, Thunderbolt 4 does not double the previous one in terms of raw throughput. Bandwidth is 40 Gb/s, the same as Thunderbolt 3, which is double the 20 Gb/s of USB 4. For reference, USB 3.1 Gen 2 is 10 Gb/s and straight USB 3.0 is 5 Gb/s.

What has doubled, however, is the number of 4K displays the interface can drive, from one 4K display to two or even one 8K display. Supported cable lengths increased to 2 meters, and hubs with four Thunderbolt connections were also introduced. This maintains compatibility with USB4. [There is a video in Intel's Thunderbolt lab showing what connections can be made by connecting an Intel Tiger Lake laptop to two 4K displays via a Thunderbolt 4 hub. It includes a short shot of files being copied from a Thunderbolt external hard drive to the machine, but cuts off as soon as we see performance fall off a cliff.

Whether another standard competing with USB4 is actually necessary is debatable, but the ability to drive two displays from a Tiger Lake laptop may be enough to convince us, especially since they look the same (using the same USB Type-C port).