Intel have released further details of their next generation Thunderbolt – their high speed interface it originally developed in partnership with Apple.

Thunderbolt 2 doubles data transfer rates to 20Gb/s and with the incorporation of DisplayPort 1.2 it will allow the transmission of raw 4k video, as well as data.

Thunderbolt has been featured on many Apple machines in the last year and it has two separate 10 GB/s copper channels, one for data and one for video. 10 GB/S is not able to stream 4K video. Thunderbolt 2 changes the two ‘channels' into a single two way channel cable which can use as much bandwidth as needed for video.

Thunderbolt 2 is backwards compatible, which means your current devices will work fine when connected to the new port. Intel say that users can daisy chain their hardware to simultaneously view and back up 4k video files on an external storage device, via a display.

Intel's Thunderbolt Marketing Director, Jason Ziller said “Backing up terabytes of data will be a question of minutes, not hours. Our labs aren't stopping there, as demand for video and rich data transfer just continues to rise exponentially.”

Kitguru says: This will be heavily adopted in the next 24 months.

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