August 29th, 2008USB 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. USB 3.0 has been on the cards for a while but it has been held up by the plans of a couple of big players (Nvidia and AMD) to develop a rival USB format – where have we heard that one before? Anyway, they’re all friends again now and everything is in place for the new technology, which is expected to start appearing on PCs and devices next year.
Tags: AMD, data, game, Intel, pipeline, SuperSpeed, Tech, technology, transfer speeds, USB, usb 2, USB 3.0
