SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec finalised
Ten times the speed of USB 2.0
USB 3.0 is complete, the group of companies behind the project announced last night. The specification is now officially at version 1.0.
Also known as SuperSpeed USB, the device-connection technology has a peak throughput ten times greater than USB 2.0's 480Mb/s.
SuperSpeed uses new ports to deliver the greater bandwidth. But they're designed to be backwards compatible with full-size USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports.
With the specification now complete, suppliers can work on building ports and the chips that manage them. That said, don't expect standalone USB 3.0 controllers to appear for the best part of a year. Consumer kit equipped with the new standard won't appear until 2010.
COMMENTS
What a bunch...
of moaning tossers you get on these pages these days.
Oh bloody hell, look it's better and faster , but my dad is still harder than yours....
FFS
Can we trawl back the archives...
USB1.0 is lauched.
Comments:
I'll stick with my 9 pin serial thanks at least I can screw that in.
Pah! it will never supersceed parrallel.
Serial? who want's serial?
Remove my RS232 port over my dead body.
33600 kps is fast enough for anyone, what's the point?
etc etc...
Get over it kiddies....
@Chris C
Yeah, it's a bad idea to give external devices truly direct access to memory. So map it through virtual memory. Or you can disable the OHCI hardware mapping, albeit with an efficiency penalty. Of course if you're close enough to a machine to be plugging things into it, security is somewhat moot (unless someone cons you into hooking up a trojan device, but that's a bit too Mission Impossible to be plausible).
The real problem with USB vs 1394 is that USB is master/slave and 1394 is P2P. Unless that's going away, and I can't see how it would, real world 1394 performance is always going to exceed USB at a given nominal data rate. What does USB 2.0 really give you? Around 40-45% of nominal bandwidth in my experience. Firewire pledges to give you 97%. 45% of 4800 Mbits/s is less than 97% of 3200 Mbits/s.
Next version
Nah, you "Super-Duper" guys are missing the obvious next implementation -- EXTREMEspeed (oh, sorry, XstreamSpeed). I'm surprised they didn't use the term for this implementation.
As for the question of whether it will have direct memory access... Didn't we already determine that giving an external device direct access to your memory, bypassing any security controls, is a bad thing?
