Leaked Intel Arrow Lake-S specs reveal Thunderbolt 5 support for desktop PCs

Thunderbolt 5 was announced in September 2023 with 80 Gb/s symmetric bandwidth for storage devices and up to 120 Gb/s unidirectional bandwidth for eGPUs or displays. This standard appears to be supported by the new Raptor Lake-R HX mobile processors, but only Razer previewed laptops with TB5 connectors this year at CES, so we can expect to see more OEMs introducing support throughout this year. What about desktop support? The latest spec sheets for Intel’s Arrow Lake-S platform leaked by Yuuki_AnS on Twitter suggest that TB5 support for desktop users should arrive in late 2024. Most likely this feature may be included with a limited number of premium and high-end Arrow Lake motherboards at launch, while the actual standardization could happen in 2025-2026.

One of the leaked schematics shows that the TB5 controller codenamed Barlow Ridge will be connected to the Arrow Lake-S CPU through 4x PCIe 4.0 lanes (64 Gb/s full duplex). Meanwhile, the CPU connects to the dGPU via 16x PCIe 5.0 lanes, and there are 4x PCIe 5.0 lanes for other devices like NVMe SSDs. The TB 5 controller can also support up to 3x displays over DP 2.1 with UHBR20, or 2x Thunderbolt 5.0 / USB4 2.0 connections with 80 / 120 Gb/s.

The great thing about TB5 is that it is fully backwards compatible with current TB3/4 USB-C cables of up to 1 m long, even though it is using the new PAM-3 signaling tech. For entry-level and mid-range Arrow Lake motherboards, Intel will only provide a TB4 controller (Hayden Bridge) supporting 2x Thunderbolt 4 connections.

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