Intel formally announces next generation Thunderbolt 2 interface capable of 20Gbps speeds

Intel has officially announced that the next generation of the Thunderbolt interface will be known as Thunderbolt 2.

The Thunderbolt 2 interface(code-named Falcon Ridge) will be able to offer data transfer speeds of 20Gbps (Gigabits per second) in both directions, almost double of what the current Thunderbolt interface offers. The announcement related to the interface was first made during the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The interface offers simultaneous 4K video file transfer and display and runs at 20 Gbps. It's worth pointing out that 4K files would be much heavier than 1080p video files.

"By combining 20Gbps bandwidth with DisplayPort 1.2 support, Thunderbolt 2 creates an entirely new way of thinking about 4K workflows, specifically the ability to support raw 4K video transfer and data delivery concurrently," says Jason Ziller, Marketing Director for Thunderbolt at Intel. "And our labs aren't stopping there, as demand for video and rich data transfer just continues to rise exponentially."

This implies that professionals and enthusiasts will be able to create, edit, and view live 4K video streams delivered from a computer to a monitor over a single cable, while backing up the same file on an external drive, or series of drives, simultaneously along the same device.

The new interface will be backward compatible with the previous generation Thunderbolt cables and connectors, which means that you'll be able to use them with devices that sport the new interface.

According to Intel, Thunderbolt 2 is currently slated to begin production before the end of this year, and it will ramp up production in 2014.

Intel claims that Thunderbolt has about 220 licensees, and greater number of compatible devices. Thunderbolt is currently included on over 30 PCs and motherboards worldwide, including on more than a dozen new 4th generation Intel Core processor-based products, as per the company. It adds that there are more than 80 Thunderbolt-enabled peripheral devices, including storage drives, expansion docks, displays, and other media capture and creation hardware.

For the uninitiated, Thunderbolt, which was code named Light Peak, is a hardware interface, developed by Intel in technical collaboration with Apple, that allows users to connect external devices including storage devices and display devices with one port. It combined both capabilities and offered more transfer speed than Firewire, which was a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communication, initiated by Apple.

The first device to ship with the Thunderbolt port was apple's 2011 MacBook Pro. Other high speed interfaces include USB 3.0 that offers transfer speeds of up to 5 Gbps, which is more commonly found than Thunderbolt. The high cost of Thunderbolt prevented it from reaching the masses.