All of these new baseline features gives Intel another premium offering to add on top of the upcoming USB 4 standard, which, confusingly enough, basically does everything Thunderbolt 3 did. (It’s baffling why Intel didn’t open up the licensing for that connection earlier.) Thunderbolt 4 will also fully support USB 4 — it has to, since they both use the USB-C cable standard — as well as docks that include up to four additional Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Crucially, Intel says the new connection will also require protection against direct memory attacks (DMA) like the recent “Thunderspy” vulnerability. That attack could theoretically allow a hacker to steal data from your device, even if your PC was locked and had encrypted storage. Those DMA protections rely on Intel’s Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d), which was supported on Thunderbolt 3 PCs, but was only strongly recommended for computer makers to follow. Now it’s an essential feature. VT-d creates an isolated memory region for devices, which prevents them from reading and writing to other locations.
