Thunderbolt cables contain microchips and firmware from digitaltrends.com

[klipschfan]

Thunderbolt cables contain microchips and firmware

[kfr01]

I saw this as well. Wild!

[jdandy]

I don't see how it makes any difference whether the chips are just ahead of or behind the plugs contacts. They don't have to be in the cable. The chip's circuitry could just as easily be on a board that the cable plugs in.

[skunark]

Well if you have a solution they will listen with checkbook in hand

Two key reasons:
1) The custom chip and circuits within the cable will more precisely match the impedance of the cable allowing data rates of +10Gbps per direction, the connectors become one more design hurdle to cross and get in the way. With this approach you can divide and conquer.
2) This also removes the cable medium requirement outside of the connector. You will be able to use optical and copper in the cable which might be required for 20Gbps.

It will be interesting read about this cable though, there could be isolation between the cable and the connectors to minimize noise and other challenges one is faced with such a high speed cable.

These speeds also open up the possibly of 'docking' your laptop to your desktop to harness it's CPUs and GPUs directly instead of using "batched/queue" processing. This won't be that exciting to the common user, but would be amazing for video editing and research communities.