The USB consortium has announced version 2 of USB4, which offers data transfer rates of up to 80 Gb/s.
You may be scratching your head reading about the maximum speed that the recently announced USB4 version 2 can achieve. 80 Gb/s is after all not exactly nothing. And the average peripheral will never reach this speed. That there is still a need for a refresh of USB4 has everything to do with a shared USB bus. If you are going to use various external SSDs via a USB4 HUB, along with an external GPU and/or monitor then a little bandwidth per device is quite nice. Home users (and certainly most office users) will still not reach the maximum speed. But in settings where a lot of data is generated and preferably needs to be processed in near real time, the extra bandwith is welcome.
‘old’ cables usable
An interesting detail: according to the designers, both existing 40 Gbps passive USB 4 cables and newly envisioned active ones can achieve 80 Gbps throughput. With a bit of luck, the active cables can also be a bit longer than the current passive ones (at least we hope so). There is also good news for Brussels: the USB-C connector will be retained.