USB 3.0 in the Pipeline

Now contain yourself! News that Intel has released the final draft specification for USB 3.0 has been sending ripples of excitement throughout the PC industry. You too will have to come to terms with a whole load of new jargon if you want to stay ahead of the game. Provisionally dubbed ‘SuperSpeed USB’ the big selling point is that data transfer speeds are up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0, which means a whopping 5 Gigabits per second. That’s really fast, quick enough to whizz a DVD from one place to another in just a few seconds and it’s going to make things like data transfer from things like MP3 players, cameras and storage devices virtually instantaneous. Plugs and sockets look superficially similar, and it should be backwards compatible but USB 3.0 sockets have an extra 5 contacts, set behind the front five contacts and these are the ones that carry the SuperSpeed data. Read More »

USB 3.0 on 2008

Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.

Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech here at the Intel Developer Forum.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there’s typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. Read More »