Intel Developers Demo USB 3.0 Throughput On Linux 231
Sarah Sharp writes "Intel's Open Source Technology Center is working on USB 3.0 support for Linux. USB 3.0 has wire speeds of 5Gbps and promises to be 10 times faster than USB 2.0. A recent video demo shows speeds that are 3.5 times faster than USB 2.0. The USB 3.0 drivers will be submitted to the mainline kernel when the eXtensible host controller interface (xHCI) specification reaches a 1.0 release."
What's in a name... (Score:5, Insightful)
USB 2.0 gave us high-speed and full-speed. Some marketing department had to work really hard on the USB 3.0 specs, to come up with... super-speed.
Now let's talk about the obvious problem: at 5 Gbit/s, it's faster than the Ethernet in my house (1 Gbit/s). Am I the only one who didn't really notice a 10X speed improvement when moving from 100 Mbit Ethernet to gigabit Ethernet? Conventional hard drives are just too slow.
Maybe SSD + USB 3.0 would be really cool. Imagine a Flash based HD camera talking to a Flash based hard drive. Is 2009 the year of the Flash?
Which brings me back to my original point: for the next generation USB, I propose the name flash-speed :-)
PS: thanks to Intel for helping Linux stay on the leading edge. It looks like Linux may even support this before Windows, thanks to the Windows 7 schedule... I just wish Intel's pre-conditions on contributing to the xHCI specs didn't start with stuff like:
Step 1. Print and execute the xHCI Contributor agreement. Note: The agreement must be executed by a corporate officer.
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http://fairsoftware.net/ [fairsoftware.net]
Re:What's in a name... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why Intel is pushing USB: it is entirely CPU dependent.
You won't notice it when you're running with X * 2 logical cores. It'll be shuffled off to some low utilization core.
Re:3.5x faster (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
USB 2.0 requires the host to control all communication on the bus, and in practice uses more CPU time than something like 1394. I don't know if they changed this in USB3 or not.
Re:Motherboards (Score:3, Insightful)
Please don't say "rig."
Re:cool, at least it is progress (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's off-topic, but I thought I'd point out why I love Slashdot by comparing it to Digg. If this story were on Digg, the comments would be something like "I BET THIS BE ON NEXT MACBOOK PRO LOL". Here, we get something like your comment in the first thread. <3 /.
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I don't get is why anybody cares about USB 3.0. For disks, its performance will suck compared with eSATA for lots of reasons (lack of true DMA, slower bus, more protocol overhead etc.). For any serious audio/video tasks, FireWire works a lot better and is already generally fast enough for 99.9% of users (and PCIe is a great alternative for that .1%). For all other devices, USB 2.0 is fast enough (and for that matter, USB 1.1 was usually fast enough). What's the intended market for this technology? It seems like it is designed to be fast just to be fast, with no real thought given to why they're making USB faster.
IMHO, USB 3.0 might have made some sense before eSATA's introduction. Now, it really doesn't, particularly given that it can't be made board-layout-compatible with existing USB 2.0 silicon because of the need to wire up the extra optical components for the 3.0 hardware. If you have to do a new board layout for 3.0 anyway, you might as well just switch to the far superior eSATA standard....