USB4 adopts Intel's Thunderbolt 3 architecture to achieve speeds of up to 40 Gbps

The USB Promoter Group won’t be sharing detailed specs of USB4 until around mid-2019. The USB Promoter Group, which is an association including the likes of Apple, HP, Intel and Microsoft among others, launched an even faster USB4 standard today. The new standard is based on Intel’s Thunderbolt protocol that Intel has contributed to the USB Promoter Group royalty free. As per a report by CNET, the contribution of Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 protocol to the USB Promoter Group essentially brings Thunderbolt 3 to mainstream PC platforms and enables various companies to integrate its support into their products. Intel’s upcoming Ice Lake processors will also be the first CPUs to support Thunderbolt 3 natively, which means that Windows users will not require an additional Thunderbolt driver to take advantage of it.