Superspeed USB 3.0 arrives
AS TIME PASSED, good old serial RS-232/423 and parallel interfaces were gradually replaced with a plethora of "new generation serial" stuff like FireWire IEEE1394 and, of course, USB. Even the ubiqutous PS/2 keyboard and mouse interfaces are giving way to USB, a process expected to complete by the time Intel launches ICH10 South Bridges in the Nehalem era.
However, as USB's theoretical peak bandwidth increases from 1.0 and 1.1 12 Mbps FullSpeed to the 2.0 480 Mbps HiSpeed - we're talking really academic peak numbers here - the CPU interrupt load on processing the USB comms also got worse.
There seems to be a shadow of old Intel legacy from those "everything on CPU " days from the early Pentium era. At that time, getting the processor to be burdened with absolutely all the I/O, even dial-up modem software codec work, was the way to justify selling higher - read more expensive - speed bins.
The extra CPU overhead, plus protocol limitations, often resulted in 400 Mbps first generation Firewire feeding otherwise identical peripherals faster than the 480 Mbps USB 2.0. Too bad the Firewire800 didn't take off in the PC world, or else USB would have a real performance competition way down the line into the next year, 2008.
Talking about the 2008, there is yet another USB refresh spec coming our way before the end of the coming year - the SuperSpeed USB 3.0. With 10x promised peak speed, and no device polling to somewhat reduce the above-mentioned CPU usage - not to mention "full backward USB 2.0 compatibility on connectors, cables and software model", we could be talking about a winner here. Or would we?
Well, the extra need for speed is there - if you want to download a full BluRay
or HD-DVD grade HD movie off the peripheral in that rumoured Micro$oft "let the
discs fight and die, our Net download will win" approach, you want it fast.
Well, the fastest USB 2 peripheral of any kind will still take over 13 minutes
to do such 25GB movie - too short for overexcited pr0n users who want the
gratification right there right now.
With USB 3.0, the SuperSpeed means some 70 seconds, just over a minute - within the satisfaction margin of the abovementioned pr0n users' excitement " window".
4.8 Gbps minus polling overhead and so on - well we could get some 300 MB/s net speed out of such thingie - let's say a large external parallel Flash-based SSD drive here.
And, there does seem to be further speed enhancements: IN and OUT lanes are now dedicated for real full-duplex transfers, and unlimited data burst length without polling is allowed, speeding up long media streams while reducing the system overhead somewhat. Command queuing and native virtualisation support are there too, plus, why not throw in an optical cabling option for the deep-pocketed ones.
Wow, looks good - after all, Intel may have seen that the future multimedia and gaming apps, or simply the next M$ Vista and Office, will eat up even eight threads of the hyperthreaded Nehalem. So, this time, better offload all the I/O far, AWAY from the CPU. How about bringing the Intelligent I/O from the servers to the desktops now? Sound, RAID, Net and wireless are prime "overhead offload" candidates, too. ยต
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..we'll have to run Vista on top of it...


USB 3.0 was also invented by AMD. Intel continues to steal AMD inventions.
When instructions sets go crazy & memory limits hit 128 gb minimum, so speed hits 300 mhz/sec- would that be 19.6 gb total 4 slot bandwidth?-at least game cards should more than double, '9=7. ULTIMATE SHOULD BE MASSIVELY STRONG & 7 humblerer.
thomas s von drashek
If only they would DITCH this: "full backward USB 2.0 compatibility on connectors". The connectors for USB are just AWFUL! There's no way to tell top from bottom, and no way to feel it either when you're reaching around the back of a system to plug something in. Firewire got the connectors right, which is something I expect as a progeny of Apple.

All a connector's got to do is:
- Connect the wires
- make it obvious how to plug it in.

USB gets %50... Failing in any book.
All is well and good until this happens:

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/18/usb-cables-back-movie-industry
I know better and faster USB would be great but at that point what hard drive would even be able to provide that amount of data at that speed. The best even these days can't hit a few 100MB/s so this is just way overkill if you had an external hard drive. If external blue/HD dvd's are readily available then then maybe but i'll bet Hard drives in 2 years will not be able to write data that fast even if was coming in at these speeds...
Okay, so perhaps USB3 will have a peak theoretical bandwidth of 4.8Gb/s, that's ~600MB/s. I'd love to see the USB storage device you're trying to hook up that can actually read/write at those kind of speeds without being a 6+ disk RAID array. :S

Most *CONSUMER* hard disks top out at ~70MB/s (at the high end).
4.8 Gbps seems adequate and perfectly reasonable.

All you nay-sayers need to get the following:
1.) this won't show up on a 'desktop near you' for almost a year, and as such should survive about at least 3 years before it becomes a bottleneck.
2.) Does Samsung 940UX ring a bell? USB-connected monitors may be the best thing since sliced bread - we can ditch/reduce compression levels since the inteface will be fast enough, and/or we can suddenly connect as many monitors as we like - in a daisy-chain!!! Bye^2 to pricey triple-head graphics. Bye^2 to overpriced and flaky long-run DVI cables.
Why is everyone knocking the high transfer speeds? Sure nothing will utilize all that bandwith, yet! But the point is to future proof the spec. USB 3.0 will be around for many years to come and who knows what other inovations will occur in the meantime for devies that would utilize this connection. 

Kudos on this spec, its is much needed since USB 2.0 spec has been saturated for some time now.
Yes, what is the point of technological progression... My god people..

Let me complain about a future tech product as I imagine using it with our current technology. I'm sure there won't be any other advancements by 2009. Even if all other tech stood still, I will still appreciate a high speed point to point connection without having to rely on network cards, cables, or switches. And maybe having extra bandwidth would be helpful when your running a usb hub and have way too many external drives plugged in.. hmm, maybe..

Second, AMD created usb 3.0? What? When and where did you read that?

Thirdly, the A connector does suck, the B and micro and mini are fine for those incapable of looking at any port before they plug something in though. Although I have some doubts about certain people. 

Although a big hint for the A connector. The "top" is indicated by the USB logo stamped on the top of it. Once you are capable of retaining this fact and maybe slightly thinking of it before just blinding jabbing a usb connector into something, this might help.
"Never, ever, feel tempted to write the word 'Microsoft' with a dollar sign instead of an 's'. It wasn't even funny the first time, several decades ago, and it just makes you look like a prat. For similar reasons, 'Microshaft' should also be avoided. The use of 'Micro$haft' carries the death penalty in several countries."

from "Ten things you really shouldn't do before you die", An Inquirer Top Ten guide, Wednesday, 03 October 2007.

I'm disappointed, fellas.
Hope that was a joke Innovator, or at least tongue in cheek. The design is by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) which include Apple Inc., Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Microsoft, Intel, and Agere. No AMD to be seen.

AMD really doesn't invent everything. Al Gore does. Really, it's all consortium work that allows tech to progress, not any one company.
think of the SSD drives. In two or three years 300MB/s will not be a problem for those, and you can RAID 0 them to get 600MB/s.
Maybe this makes vista ReadyBoost work...
Never know what might be coming down the pike in the next 5 years. 

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/

If Mtron, Samsung and the other flash manufacturers build a bunch of massive factories for SSDs, we just might be seeing external RAID-0 SSD arrays over USB 3.0 cables. They might actually be affordable in 3-5 years. Who knows? 

A lot can happen in 3-5 years in the computer industry these days. They might have 1 TERABYTE external RAID-0 SSD arrays over USB 3.0 in 5 years! Moore's Law is powerful. The hard drive might be a museum piece. 

These people doing the specs need to think big. In 5 years everyone might have 8 cores on a chip with 40 mb of cache crammed on them. We may already be down to 22nm manufacturing in 6-7 years. That is what you call small ... VERY small. I'm not sure they can make them much smaller. We're talking well over a few billion transistors here.

Believe it or not, they might have to do a USB 4.0 in 5 years that's even more future-proofed.
Am I the only one being annoyed by this guy who seems like he's trying be funny, only he's not?
I love USB. It allows Multi-seat X systems and such...

"Although a big hint for the A connector. The "top" is indicated by the USB logo stamped on the top of it. Once you are capable of retaining this fact and maybe slightly thinking of it before just blinding jabbing a usb connector into something, this might help. "

Many front connectors work well that way, but most, around back, are up and down. Now, what good does the USB emblem do? I just walked around to the back of my desk and saw two vertical slots which would be upside-down by the label if up was seen from the top of the motherboard, and I have an expansion card with the slots horizontal but also upside-down... Sigh. I was hoping that the comment was true, but unfortunately, in my world, it is not.

"Yes, what is the point of technological progression..."

Obviously, bigger and more powerful servers. That is the only way most outfits can use all the power from even one new PC these days. It takes a hundred simultaneous users clicking and gawking to load a new dual socket/quad core/RAMbunctious beast. Or one serious number cruncher or graphics renderer.
Just remember that this bandwidth is per port, not per device, so if you connect a couple of hard drives, a uber usb3 sound card and a couple of other devices, you could start to use up this bandwidth. How about a usb3 graphics box with an nvidia or amd/ati graphics core etc. No such thing as too much bandwidth!
Hmm, even a usb3 cpu stick,.All we need is for the big guns to think outside the square.
"Thirdly, the A connector does suck, the B and micro and mini are fine for those incapable of looking at any port before they plug something in though. Although I have some doubts about certain people.

Although a big hint for the A connector. The "top" is indicated by the USB logo stamped on the top of it. Once you are capable of retaining this fact and maybe slightly thinking of it before just blinding jabbing a usb connector into something, this might help."

The point is you shouldn't have to know where to look (or have to look) to work out which way the damn thing plugs in... what proportion of people that use USB know how to tell which side is 'up'? Or is USB an elitist device only for those who've been to USB school?
4.8GPS is crazy fast, but something very important is lacking. 

Hard drive transfer speeds. 


If transfer speed improvements were on par with storage capasity this wouldn't be an issue but, there has been very little in the way of drive read/write speeds improvements in eons.
Think about this: multiple transfers going on at the same time to different devices with few if any bottlenecks.
FireWire got it right with the higher voltage and current which allows a lot more devices to be powered through the single cable. USB with 2.5w is woefully underpowered. FW800 got a bit more complicated than it should have. USB is typically lower performing than it's made out to be by the PR bunnies and device (PR) specs.