USB3 hardware exposed

IF YOU ARE waiting for USB3 to hit the shelves, don't put your life on hold. That said, the USB Implementors Forum was showing off the guts of the Fresco Logic box they had at CES and a USB3 card.

USB3 presented by no one named Al

The first goodie was the guts of the Fresco Logic box that we showed you at CES. As you can see, it is a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA that does the magic, but it does work, and you do get some pretty good speeds out of it. No more waiting for the ultimate Britney collection to go from your Macbook with stickers all over it to your Iplod with custom Britney engravings, USB3 is about 10 times as fast as USB2.

USB3 PC card

If you look closely at the PCIe version of the card, you will see that it is just the external one with the plastic removed. Smart design, but a little underwhelming as far as technophiles are concerned. Fresco, it seems, was smart enough to design one reference board to do both jobs.

The schedule is about where it was last time we checked, with native silicon due before the end of the year, and products probably mid-2010.

That would have it coming on the Intel 6x and AMD 9xx chipsets, usually launched at CeBit or Computex. µ