What will happen to TB3 ports if Apple moves to ARM chips?

[ondert]

I wonder this question for the last few days. Thunderbolt interface was designed with both intel and Apple together. What will happen to these ports if Apple use its own ARM based A chips in the next MacBooks? There will be totally different chipsets and how Intel will let Apple use the interface if there is no intel cpu on board?

 

[chabig]

Nobody knows, but USB 3 already meets the needs of the majority of today’s Mac customers. USB 4 is coming soon and it is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 3.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB4

 

[treekram]

There's a lot going on with Thunderbolt 3 right now. Intel plans to integrate TB3 in it's CPU's. USB will use Thunderbolt to get to 40Gb/sec (as mentioned in the previous post).

Certain Intel Thunderbolt controllers are used in PCIe cards that can be plugged into PC's so I don't see why they technically can't be used on the same logic board with non-Intel CPU's as long as they can provide a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface to the controller.
https://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/product.asp?Model=Thunderbolt 3 AIC#Specification