SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec finalised

Ten times the speed of USB 2.0

By Tony Smith, 18th November 2008

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.

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

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Posted Thursday 27th November 2008 14:15 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@stu reeves

exactly :)

Posted Wednesday 19th November 2008 14:13 GMT

Stu Reeves

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....

Posted Wednesday 19th November 2008 10:24 GMT

David Gillies

@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.