Also known as: Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4

Thunderbolt is a high-speed connection standard that carries data, video, and power over a single cable, tunnelling PCI Express and DisplayPort and sharing the USB-C connector.¹

Overview

Developed by Intel and Apple, Thunderbolt 3 and 4 run at 40 Gb/s over a USB-C plug, with Thunderbolt 5 reaching 80 Gb/s; a single cable can drive displays, attach external SSDs and GPUs, deliver power, and even act as a peer-to-peer network link. Because it tunnels PCI Express, a Thunderbolt port behaves almost like an external expansion slot, which is why one cable to a dock can fan out to Ethernet, displays, and storage at once. Thunderbolt 3 onward is compatible with USB-C but offers far more bandwidth than plain USB.

Where it fits

Thunderbolt is the fast end of the peripheral connection spectrum, suited to bandwidth-hungry external devices on laptops and workstations. For an SDR workflow it gives a single-cable path to a dock or a fast external SSD — handy when a GopherTrunk session is recording raw I/Q at high sample rates and writing many megabytes per second to disk.

Sources

1. Thunderbolt (interface) — Wikipedia, on the high-speed Thunderbolt interface. ↩

See also

• USB
• PCI Express (PCIe)
• Peripheral
• Network interface card (NIC)
• Ethernet