USB 3.0 Getting a Speed Boost To 10 Gbps 144
cylonlover writes "The USB 3.0 Promoter Group has used CES 2013 to announce an enhancement to the USB 3.0 (aka SuperSpeed USB) standard that will see the throughput performance of USB 3.0 double from 5 Gbps to 10 Gbps. The speed boost will come courtesy of enhanced USB connectors and cables that are fully backward compatible with existing USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 devices. The 10 Gbps SuperSpeed USB update (pdf) is up for industry review during the first quarter of 2013, with completion of the standard expected by the middle of the year."
My Porn (Score:3, Funny)
I can transfer my porn to thumb drive in only a couple of hours now!!!!
Re:My Porn (Score:4, Funny)
Don't be ridiculous. You can't fit it all on a thumb drive.
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I'm pretty sure he can [slashdot.org].
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Hours? Maybe you need a palm drive?
Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
So what's the point of having a version number on your standard, if you don't increment the number when you change the standard?
Customer: "This computer has USB 3, but my 10Gbps device only connects at 5Gbps!"
Support Tech: "Oh, that's because you have USB SuperSpeed 3.0 Revision 1 rather than USB SuperSpeed 3.0 Revision 2."
Maybe call it USB SuperSpeed 3.1?
Re:Standards (Score:4, Interesting)
So USB could replace SATA. Well if they get the overhead down.
I would really like to see a SATA IV spec that is a little faster but includes power on the connector. It makes little sense to me to have separate connectors for power and data on SATA since you can not have an unpowered SATA device.
Re:Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
USB will never replace SATA:
* It hits the CPU for each transfer
* the overhead is higher
* The latency is way higher, as it needs to set up and tear down connections for each transfer
* It doesnt support ATA commands (TRIM, for one)
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quibble: the usb mass storage spec does allow for ata,
even if it is very seldom used.
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I guess you missed the comment about getting the overhead down.
Re:Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot get the overhead down without making USB into a storage-specific protocol...
at which point you've just re-made eSATA.
Why not just use the storage specific protocol we already have?
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Good point but then CPU power is now getting silly cheap. I could see low end systems just using USB for everything including internal mass storage just to save money.
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This seems so wrong to me...
* current controllers hit the CPU for each transfer
-> there will be hardware acceleration if this is wanted
* the overhead is higher
-> what overhead? data overhead which is so much trouble if we have such an excessive amount of bandwidth?
* The latency is way higher, as it needs to set up and tear down connections for each transfer
-> the connection does not need t
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-> what overhead? data overhead which is so much trouble if we have such an excessive amount of bandwidth?
The overhead that comes from using a non-point-to-point, general purpose protocol.
-> the connection does not need to be opened and closed for each transfer - why not keep it open?
Not being a USB engineer, I cannot answer that, but I have a feeling it has to do with the fact that you could in theory have a hub connected and a printer might want use of the USB line for a bit, and an "always open" connection would block that. Its just a guess.
But regardless, throw an SSD on USB 3 and run IOmeter, then compare with an SSD on SATA. The USB one will have latency ~10x higher or worse, potentially much worse
Re:Standards (Score:4, Informative)
You're close. It's not a 'connection' so much as it is a token allowing the target device to talk. It can't just be left with one target in case another target might need service.
So being non p-t-p is highly relevant as you guessed.
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From what I've read, the connection set-up (handshakes, acks, etc) is also a large cause of the latency. A device cant just start throwing data down the wire, it needs to negotiate, make sure it was heard, and generally assume that the connection is prone to packet loss; and all of that generally slows the connection down.
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Transactions do add a fair bit of latency as well.It's part of the cost of needing to handle a device being suddenly disconnected while not disrupting other devices in the same tree. Your keyboard needs to keep working even if you unplug a USB stick in mid-write.
usb?? ssd's on the pci-e bus are faster then sata (Score:3)
usb?? ssd's on the pci-e bus are faster then sata
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main HDD not one to take files with you and (Score:2)
main HDD not one to take files with you and having main hdd + a disk to take with you will just slow down the USB over all as well the likely X1 pci-e link
Thunderbolt killer (Score:5, Interesting)
So USB could replace SATA.
More likely it will just keep Thunderbolt from ever really taking off. SATA is pretty common and there are enough technical headaches with using USB instead that it is probably going to stick around. (though eSATA might be a different story since it is far less commonly used) But if USB is fast enough there really is limited need for Thunderbolt. I already can run a monitor via USB 2.0 through a docking station I use daily and that works fine.
I'm less interested in faster USB than I am in 100W USB [slashdot.org]. The ability to power a laptop or small PC with a single USB cable would be huge. Anything that reduces the number of different types of cables I have to deal with is a good thing.
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They just need to get the laptops down to 25.5W, then they could run off PoE+, and they'd be able to put decent battery life in them.
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As soon as you can pump that 25.5W over 802.11N (PoWE+) without causing the cat's hair to stand up when it walks between me and the base station, sign me up!
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They just need to get the laptops down to 25.5W, then they could run off PoE+, and they'd be able to put decent battery life in them.
USB is more flexible. I can (and do) run Ethernet over USB. Harder to do it the other way around. Conceptually you are right though - as long as we can do away with the single purpose power cord I'm fine with USB or ethernet or something else. A cable that carries power but no data seems pointless to me.
Re:Standards (Score:4, Informative)
I would really like to see a SATA IV spec that is a little faster but includes power on the connector.
Isn't that what eSATAp [wikipedia.org] is for?
Re:Standards (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems to me what SATA should have been.
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I would really like to see a SATA IV spec that is a little faster but includes power on the connector. It makes little sense to me to have separate connectors for power and data on SATA since you can not have an unpowered SATA device.
I would rather not have power for 5 or more SATA drives running through my motherboard just to make a unified connector the standard. Same goes for RAID cards (especially the 8+ port ones).
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I would rather not have power for 5 or more SATA drives running through my motherboard just to make a unified connector the standard. Same goes for RAID cards (especially the 8+ port ones).
Or SAS/SATA port expanders, which currently only need a very small amount of power (as they are just re-routing the low-power data signals), but with built-in power, you could even go beyond the 75W limit for graphic card draw from the slot, never mind the 35W "other" card limit.
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Power comes from the PSU, while data goes to the motherboard.
If a single connector carried everything, then power would have to flow through the motherboard. That's a lot of power if you've 8 disks connected to it. Power that would heat up lots of circuits, etc.
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It doesn't matter. Most of the time, the hardware manufacturers don't print the rated speeds on the cables (and usually don't even print the standard - USB 2.0, USB 3.0, etc.). They just use their own marketing lingo that generally has no bearing on the standard whatsoever. It's difficult (at best) to compare apples-to-apples when buying a simple USB cable.
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It's difficult (at best) to compare apples-to-apples
Sometimes it's difficult to compare Apples to Apples.
"I'd like to Max out my RAM. I have an iMac"
"Sure, but what version? That makes all the difference for what RAM it can use"
"Um, it's got a black back and I bought it in 2011 from a friend who upgraded to a newer Mac. I don't see a version number."
"Call your friend and find out when it was purchased from Apple"
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It's difficult (at best) to compare apples-to-apples
Sometimes it's difficult to compare Apples to Apples. "I'd like to Max out my RAM. I have an iMac" "Sure, but what version? That makes all the difference for what RAM it can use" "Um, it's got a black back and I bought it in 2011 from a friend who upgraded to a newer Mac. I don't see a version number." "Call your friend and find out when it was purchased from Apple"
Just select "About this Mac" and then "More info" and you get the information you need - "Macbook Air, 13 inch, Mid 2011" in my case. Plus some extra information about processor, memory (installed size, type and speed) etc.
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On one hand, USB already confused consumers by supporting a plethora of speeds. On the other hand, today SATA is sold by speed and that doesn't seem too confusing for people.
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Simple explanation: SATA is primarily an internal-facing interface. "Consumers" almost never see it, only tech-savy individuals. And even the slowest SATA standard is still drastically faster than all but the most cutting-edge drives can use so in most cases the version doesn't actually matter much anyway.
USB on the other hand was specifically designed as a user-facing interface to make life easier for people who had trouble getting all the different "can only fit in one socket" cables plugged into their
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*never quite understood that - it's not *that* much harder than the blocks-and-holes puzzles they solved as a toddler. Well, except the identical but non-interchangable PS-2 mouse and keyboard plugs - those were always a headache if you couldn't see the labels.
"Back in the day" it was not unusual to look at the back of a PC and see two DIN plugs and three or even more unlabeled DB-9 plugs, each of which had different signalling requirements and might let out smoke if you get them wrong. And in fact, it was not unusual to look at the back of a Mac and see two DB-15s and two DIN-4s, again with completely different signalling and power. So it's only today that I find it particularly inexplicable when people can't set up a computer when things literally work anywhere
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Really? Maybe I'm blocking something out, but most every personal computer (servers, etc were admittedly a whole different ballgame) I worked on had very limited connectivity options - PCs had their keyboard DIN (or later the ps-2 mini-DIN pair) rarely more than two DB-25 or -9 serial ports, and a DB-25 parallel port with an opposite gender, and the VGA port with an extra row of pins. Oh, and often a game port, can't forget that :-). Nothing that could be plugged in wrong. Seems like one of the early SCS
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I remember, DrinkyPoo.... Oh boy, do I remember. When I was a kid doing a lab rotation I made the mistake of plugging what I thought was a serial line printer that we had laying around in a store room into a PC serial port to replace the broken line printer for the gamma counter. Ooops. Everything looked fine for a few seconds, then the printer started spewing paper and printing random gibberish. Then it let the blue smoke out. Fried the printer's board. I think the printer might have gone with an ol
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Hoo yeah - once you get into the world of non-consumer hardware there was (and still is) a LOT of potential for magic smoke release - after all the D-sub plugs are industry standard mechanical descriptions for generic electronic interconnects to be used as-needed. I remember the physics labs being *full* of devices that you absolutely, positively did not want to try plugging into a computer, no matter how temptingly compatible the plug looked. That D-subs were used for PCs at all is likely a cost-cutting d
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PCs had their keyboard DIN (or later the ps-2 mini-DIN pair) rarely more than two DB-25 or -9 serial ports, and a DB-25 parallel port with an opposite gender, and the VGA port with an extra row of pins
Before VGA, there were MDA, CGA, and EGA, each on a DB9. And many early busmice also used a DB9... but they also used DIN ports. And it was not unusual to get a busmouse and an ISA card to match cheaper than a PS/2 mouse at the time, either. If you had a light pen it was probably proprietary and often on a DB9. And these are just the examples I can come up with off the top of my head.
Amusingly, on Intel motherboards you can or could commonly swap KB and Mouse and they would work fine, but I don't recall any
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Re: Standards (Score:2)
I thought I was the only one! Same situation, couldn't see the back and instead of using my finger I used the plug and inserted. About 15 minutes of me thinking my mouse was dead was rectified when I pulled it from its wedge and found it in the extra ethernet port. >.
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Fair enough, I've done it many times myself when plugging things in by touch, especially when they're immediately adjacent to a USB port. I'd argue on the perfect fit though - the width is right, but it's a pretty sloppy fit vertically, and if you're paying attention to what you're doing it only takes a couple seconds thought to realize that the purpose of a plug is to make electrical connections, so the combination can't possibly be right.
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I can't wait for someone to take this post out of context.
Re:Standards (Score:4, Funny)
*never quite understood that - it's not *that* much harder than the blocks-and-holes puzzles they solved as a toddler.
Users have experienced the USB disorientability principle (try to plug in USB cable, doesn't fit, rotate connector 180 degrees, still doesn't fit, rotate connector again, plugs right in) enough times that they're concluded computer cables exist in some inscrutable 5-dimensional space and given up trying to understand what plugs in where and why.
Stupid plug design (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that, USB plugs actually have a half-integer spin so that a 360-degree rotation actually inverts their perspective on the universe rather than returning them to the original orientation.
USB is actually a pretty unique case in user-facing plugs, and it rather pisses me off - what idiot thought that a perfect rectangle was a good shape for a connector? It's not like it was a surprise problem - almost every prior external plug was either a trapezoid whose orientation could to told with a glance or touch, or a round DIN which could often be partially inserted and then rotated until the "key" engaged (I rather liked those). Internal ribbon cables had already faced the problem for decades and come up with a progressive variety of solutions that most everyone agreed were sub-par and acceptable only because it was so rarely an issue. The keyed plug and collar had been settled on as the best solution for IDE and floppy cables long before USB was designed, and even that had the advantage over USB that you could often feel the respective orientations when working in situations where you couldn't see one or both of them. And it's not exactly like the solution was in any way difficult, just change the shape of the sheath. For crying out loud even the USB-B connectors designed as part of the same standard were uniquely orientable! /rant
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The PS/2 mouse, the PS/2 keyboard, and the Zip drive power connector all use a 6-pin mini-DIN plug, and are completely non-interchangeable (plug a mouse into your Zip drive, it doesn't work. Plug a Zip drive power brick into your computer, and watch
Re:Standards (Score:5, Informative)
It is a trademark of USB. Not one USB standard has had a single speed nor has it had its speed easily recognizable from the marketing garbage spilled by the consortium. And I'm not even talking about the mess of mixing USB1 & 2 devices and hubs. USB Full Speed, Hi Speed, Low Speed... and now SuperSpeed.
To illustrate, here is an excerpt of the Wikipedia page:
High-speed USB 2.0 hubs contain devices called transaction translators that convert between high-speed USB 2.0 buses and full and low speed buses. When a high-speed USB 2.0 hub is plugged into a high-speed USB host or hub, it will operate in high-speed mode. The USB hub will then either use one transaction translator per hub to create a full/low-speed bus that is routed to all full and low speed devices on the hub, or will use one transaction translator per port to create an isolated full/low-speed bus per port on the hub.
Garbage.
They obviously HAD to do the same for USB3, for old times' sake. We will laugh about it to our grandchildren next to the fireplace. But that'll be later.
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Just stay away from USB LudicrousSpeed. I tried it and my wallpaper was changed to this [typepad.com]
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That must have been devastating for your tennis game. Mixing metaphors is fun!
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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USB 3.1 (Score:2)
Actually applying version numbers to help people differentiate between subsequent verions would make too much sense.
Re:Standards (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe call it USB SuperSpeed 3.1?
It will never take off then. Everyone will wait for USB 3.11 For Workgroups.
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They won't do that because then consumers will know the difference, and as it turns out, that's bad for business.
Remember http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/06/18/2025210/usb-11-renumbered-to-usb-2 [slashdot.org]?
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Maybe call it USB SuperSpeed 3.1?
I vote for "USB_maybe_we_should_have_just_used_UTP_RJ45s_in_the_first_place."
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Maybe call it USB SuperSpeed 3.1?
I am waiting for USB SuperSpeed 3.11 for Workgroups.
USB 3.1? (Score:2)
Can we call it USB 3.1 or something so it's less confusing?
Could we at least make them a different color? (Score:1)
Or mark them in *some* way so I can tell all the basically identical USB ports and cables apart?
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USB3 cables have a differently shaped connector from USB1-2.
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Not really, there are a couple new "B" connectors but the "A" connectors are exactly the same.
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Wikipedia has pictures, but basically says A is the same but B is larger and won't fit in older B slots.
From Wikipedia:
USB 3.0 connectors
- Type A plugs and receptacles from both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 are designed to interoperate.
- Type B receptacles in USB 3.0 are somewhat larger than would be required for a Type B plug in USB 2.0 and earlier. The larger dimension for a USB 3.0 Type B receptacle is intended to allow connecting of either the larger USB 3.0 Type B plug or the smaller USB 2.0 or earlier Type B p
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Wikipedia has pictures, but basically says A is the same but B is larger and won't fit in older B slots.
This is one of those cases where Wikipedia hasn't kept up with the real world, because I haven't found any USB 3.0 device (which is where the B-connector resides) that uses anything but a micro-B connector, which is completely different from the old B connector.
On the other hand, the A connector/plug backward compatibility works perfectly, as I can plug a USB 2.0 cable into a 3.0 connector on my PC, or a 3.0 cable into a 2.0 connector.
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I can't find cables with the new micro-B connector on monoprice.
Since the device should come with a cable with the micro-B, you can just use an extension [monoprice.com] with the original cable.
You can also get decent prices at Newegg [newegg.com] for full replacement cables. Remember to change the sort to "Lowest Price".
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All of my USB devices have either a description or symbol right on the male plug. The female ends are usually labeled too. It's not as quick and dirty as color coding, but it does work better when you consider the reality of a world where not everyone follows color coding standards.
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The new USB 3.0 cables are supposed to have a different logo embossed on them containing an "SS" connected to the old USB "tree" logo. - See section 5.5.6 of the USB 3.0 spec.
USB 3.0 ports and the plastic bit inside the cable connectors are supposed to be color coded blue (Pantone 300C is recommended) - See section 5.3.1.3 of the USB 3.0 spec.
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The extra contacts are also a dead giveaway
can we call it (Score:4, Insightful)
SuperDuperSpeed USB?
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Ultra is more 60s, and Turbo is more 80s.
I'm guessing something inspirational/aspirational like "USB Vista" or a made up word like "USB Zune" or add an R at the end with no vowel, so "USBr"
There has been some roman numeral stuff in recent phones, along with astronomical themes, so my best guess at this time for the next USB standard marketing name is "Stellar USBr IV+"
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Other buzzwords we can use:
Mega USB
Giga USB
Jigga USB
Wowza USB
I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Instant USB
MS-USB
USB Reloaded
USB The Wrath of Khan
This USB Standard Was Sponsored By McDonalds
Democracy USB
War On Slow Speeds USB
iUSB
USB 3.14159265359
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You forgot Freedom USB =P
CPU utilization, pc to pc, and Power not speed (Score:5, Informative)
USB3 is fairly fast as it is. It uses far to much CPU time right now as in pegging a cpu while writing 150MBs while the internal sata's on the same machine writing to the same model drive is 20%. The enhanced power is not part of the base standard so there is a chicken and the egg issue with anything using it it needs to be baked in. The USB3 spec allows for pc to pc connects but again it's not a requirement to support it so no OS supports it.
Stability issues? (Score:3)
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My old computer has a Renasas controller. I had the same problem where USB 2.0 devices would work fine with large file transfers, but USB 3.0 drives on the same USB 3,0 port would have transfer problems. I upgraded the firmware on the Renasas chip and verified that I had the latest driver with no change.
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I had similar issues with a USB3 pcie card. I don't remember the chip-model but the problem was solved by switching to another card made by another OEM. This one had the same chip and used the same driver, so I assume either a faulty card or a faulty design was to blame.
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You have an interference problem. I had this same problem with a USB 2.0 printer, even with a high quality cable. The problem was that the cable was next to a VGA cable and several AC power cables. Since USB is not isolated (like ethernet) and the differential data wires are not twisted (like ethernet), it is very sensitive to interference.
TLDR: move the USB cable away from other cables.
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80 MB/s? Firewire 800 from 2003 can do better than that.
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Anybody else experience stability issues with USB 3.0 or is just me.
I only had an issue when I plugged two USB 3.0 devices into the same controller. When they were plugged into separate "root hubs" (use "View devices by connection" in Windows device manager), they worked fine.
Basically, I was trying to copy files from one external drive to another, and it kept dying just as you experienced. Now, I get close to 100MB/sec transfer speeds.
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This makes me wonder if the new USB3 could be used as a replacement?
No
How long can the cables be and still maintain 10Gbps speeds?
About 10feet. Unless you had a powered cable or repeater... then about 20 feet.
And could one just connect two computers via USB3 without any additional equipment required in-between?
No, as stated above, you'd need a repeater.
Will someone come up with some USB3-based network routing solution before 10Gbps ethernet - solution become cheap enough for general consumer use?
There already is. You'll have to look around but there are such things. It'd be much easier however, to load balance multiple connections or switch to fiber.
I would have use for higher speeds as 1Gbps just ain't good enough.
That's because you're doing it wrong. Unless you're processing data from your basement super collider, there's no way you need faster than 1Gig. Most likely you have your network setup improperly an
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Last thing I'd check is your jumbo frames setting.
Already said that it is on.
And it probably only buys you 5-10% more speed, anyway, assuming you are getting decent overall speeds.
If you are down less 20MB/sec (like these benchmarks [smallnetbuilder.com]), you can get a 20-50% boost. Without jumbo frames, I run a solid 40MB/sec copying from one Windows share to another on my network, and jumbo frames couldn't get me over 50MB/sec, while mis-matches between jumbo/non-jumbo config dropped me to less than 20MB/sec at times.
Note that if I eliminate the slowest hard drive in the transfer by reading from a ve
enhanced USB connectors (Score:1)
wait (Score:2)
Are there ANY devices out there that would need even 1gig transfer rates? Much less 10? I'm sure there's some obscure shit out there that might, but is it worth a new standard? The only thing I can think of is maybe a RAM drive or SSD... but Sata would be a far superior choice for those devices. So again, why do we keep getting faster USB ports when there's nothing to plug into them?
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eSATA has a couple of practical problems. Firstly if you set the SATA mode to "ATA" for ease of installing an older OS you often lose your eSATA port. Secondly most computers with eSATA only had one port and practically speaking eSATA is limited to one device per port. Port multipliers exist in theory but not all controllers support them, you can only have one level of them and i've only ever seen them integrated in drive enclosures not as a seperate product. Thirdly power was an afterthought hacked in late
DMA? (Score:2)
I thought USB was CPU bound did 3 add DMA abilities and all the fun security issues that involves?
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Re:Will this speed ever be used? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think its a matter of scale. So raw uncompressed video signal on an original displayport connector is 4.32 Gbit/s... now instead of a "USB" port being able to carry one uncompressed video signal it could carry two. Of course displayport 1.2 does 17.28 Gbit/s, so we've gone from only 1/4 to only 1/2 of a video signal. On the other hand, displayport has about twice the BW available as HDMI, so you could just about replace HDMI with USB now on a raw available BW basis. Although it would be a heck of a lot more intelligent to shove compressed video down the cable rather than raw uncompressed.
Using USB for a uncompressed video connection is not a valid or useful data point, anyway. But it does make the point that this is competitive with the fastest port anyone is likely to ever have access to. Nothing in your average dude's computer will ever be able to saturate a USB thats faster or about as fast as the video cable. A more normal use case is I'm sure my typing speed was not limited by 5.0 Gigs USB so 10.0 Gigs USB is not going to help.
In the very long run we will not have USB / Firewire / SATA / PATA / Displayport / HDMI we'll have just one connector and protocol to run them all. Plug your keyboard, mouse, LAN adapter and monitor into your hub connected to your phone and be done with it. The only question is which standard will win. Probably USB.
Re:Will this speed ever be used? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the very long run we will not have USB / Firewire / SATA / PATA / Displayport / HDMI we'll have just one connector and protocol to run them all. Plug your keyboard, mouse, LAN adapter and monitor into your hub connected to your phone and be done with it. The only question is which standard will win. Probably USB.
That was the hope with Thunderbolt/LightPeak, which is on all Macs these days and works well. One cable carries two full-duplex 10Gb channels (10Gb each way simultaneously per channel). But "docks" have been slow in coming and expensive. And because the USB group refused to integrate the standard or allow them to use the connector, they switched to the DisplayPort interface which is nice and compact. Now we have a slower standard coming much later for which existing cables may or may not work but look the same as the current ones... fun.
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For lower speed we have Lightning. You get 8 pins plus ground. Over that, you can run pretty much anything that the pins will support, with the embedded chips in the ends doing any pin reassignment. USB3 is 8+ground+shield, so it could probably be run over Lightning. We should be able to run analog audio and video, as well as HDMI and other things too. It is the universal low-speed point-to-point connector.
Thunderbolt is meant for higher purpose than USB3, since you can theoretically run multiple monitors,
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terribly complicated $50 cables with microcontroller sin the wire to handle connections.
They are basicly PCI-E lanes built into an external jack. Intel wanted to do fibre optics with the protocol, but it never happened.
"Now we have a slower standard coming much later for which existing cables may or may not work but look the
Re: Will this speed ever be used? (Score:2)
I've heard this argument before but I fail to see where the benefit is for the average consumer. Most things I would plug into a PCI-E 1/4/8/16 I wouldn't want lying on my desk. There are roughly three common items people would use, Video cards, Sound cards, and wireless adapters. I fail to see the advantage. If we're discussing removable storage eSATA and USB are fine. Thunderbolt is great for thr future but sans video card housing for laptops there is little use for it as a PCI-E port for the forseea
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The deal is that if you want a generic interface for lots of purposes, its got to be cheap, or many of those purposes simply don't make any sense when a much more economical solution exists that doesnt require any of those "advanced" features that drive up the cost.,
On the other hand if you want a specific interface with a specific purpose, its also doesnt make sense to increase costs with generic requirements.
The upshot is that by the time the mar
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Nothing? Have you paid attention to computing in the last 10 years? Everything is interconnected... if monitor resolutions go up, you damned well better believe the average picture size will go up just so it can be viewed fullscreen without getting blurry. Movies will follow a similar trend (think the SD to HD switch). How about games? I remember how amazed I was that Diablo 2 took so many CDs... and now there's games that take multiple DVDs. What about Windows... and installing from USB thumb drive is beco
Re: Will this speed ever be used? (Score:2)
Time is the constraint on the human condition. We damn well should want mundane tasks to be instanteous.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that Windows 7 does. See: any Ivy Bridge-based computer that shipped in 2012 previous to the release of Windows 8.
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I have a Sandy Bridge-based notebook that did USB 3.0 just fine under Windows 7. I upgraded it to Windows 8, no more USB 3.0 (the port doesn't work for USB 2.0, either). Apparently the Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller is still not qualified for Windows 8. There are hack workarounds that fake the installer into thinking it is still running under Windows 7, but it keeps getting disabled periodically and I have to re-install the drivers to make it work again (PITA, multiple reboots).