USB 4 Will Support Thunderbolt and Double the Speed of USB 3.2 (engadget.com)

At a Taipei event earlier today, Intel revealed that USB 4 will once again utilize dual channels to achieve 40Gbps speeds, even on existing 40Gbps-certified USB-C cables. A report adds: Better yet, thanks to Intel finally offering Thunderbolt 3 to manufacturers with open licensing, USB 4 will be integrating this tech and thus effectively becoming the "new" Thunderbolt 3. In other words, USB 4 will pretty much be the mother of all wired connectivity options, and will be ready for more powerful PCIe plus DisplayPort devices. It is expected to take 18 months between the final spec of USB 4 being published in the second half of this year, and the first devices hitting the market, so don't expect to see USB 4-powered commercial devices until sometime in 2021.
Further reading, from last week: USB-IF Confusingly Merges USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Under New USB 3.2 Branding.

Comments

Re:Will the wires catch on fire?

[Morgon]

Oldschool HDMI was 4.2 Gbit. The newer 2.0 spec is 18 GBit, which are almost certainly the most common now.

But you are correct (in spirit - we're talking Gbit, not GB) that the next gen, 2.1, claims to be 48Gbit, but a) they're not in wide enough use to test this argument (I don't know that any consumer gear has 2.1 yet), and b) you'd need to actually use that bandwidth (e.g. 4K/120, 8K), which again is not going to be common for some time.

It does look like HDMI 2.1 cables are thick enough to have decent shielding.

Re:Will the wires catch on fire?

[Anubis IV]

Though a bit of an oversimplification, USB4 is basically just a rebranding of Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 already does 40Gbps and has been out now for a few years. I have yet to hear reports of cables spontaneously erupting in flame or whatnot, and though USB 3.x and TB3 cables are stiffer than USB 2 cables, I don't think they're swaddled in insulation to a crazy degree. If you're curious how this will work, look back over the documentation for TB3.

Re:Will the wires catch on fire?

[bluefoxlucid]

Unless USB4 cables will have a ton of insulation, to prevent the outside world from interfering with it. Or will it have more error checking thus this 40Gbs is just a theoretical speed, and it is actually much slower in real life, because it keeps on on having data loss.

You have to overcome miller capacitance in the cables, so the voltages are extremely-low.

What you do, you twist pairs of signal-carrying cables around each other, and you raise a signal cable by a few millivolts to signal. The signal pair will be e.g. 5mV apart. If you get EMI, then each cable will raise its voltage state equally, so you go from 0mV/5mV to 27mV/32mV. That's still 5mV, it's still signal, it's still clear.

Self-shielding.