Gigabyte has quietly added its first Thunderbolt 5 expansion card to its website, naming it "Thunderbolts 5." The card itself is nothing special compared to Thunderbolt 4 expansion cards, but it does bring a third miniDisplayPort input (for unknown reasons) as well as two USB Type-C outputs.
Gigabyte has also added support for more power supplies this time around, as the card comes with what appears to be a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors and supports 100W USB PD charging. The card uses the new JHL9580 or BarlowRidge controller, supports DP2.1, has a resolution of up to 8K60Hz, and a data transmission speed of up to 80Gbps, 120/40Gbps in asymmetric mode.
Intel's JHL9580 controller supports the PCIe4.0x4 host interface, which is the same as ASMedia's ASM4242USB4 host controller. It is a big improvement compared to Intel's previous Thunderbolt4 controller using PCIe3.0. It should be noted that JHL9580 also has a Thunderbolt 4 version, namely JHL9540, which also uses the PCIe4.0x4 interface and supports DP2.1, but the speed is slower. The two new Barlow Ridge controllers also support USB3.2Gen2x2 (20Gbps), while previous Thunderbolt controllers did not support USB3.2Gen2x2.
The Intel JHL9580 will launch at $19, which is just over $8 more than the JHL8540 MapleRidge controller launched in 2020, so expect the Thunderbolt 5 expansion card to have a higher price point than previous Thunderbolt 4 expansion cards.
Gigabyte may be the first to launch, but we expect most motherboard manufacturers to launch their own products before the end of the year.