Smoke, smole and smoke again - INQ cognitive dissonance correspondent
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Intel puts USB 3.0 into Ivy Bridge for 2012
CHIPMAKER Intel has said that it will be integrating USB 3.0 connectivity into its Ivy Bridge chipsets in 2012.
Intel's announcement that its 2012 Ivy Bridge chipsets will support USB 3.0 came on the same day that the USB Association revealed that AMD will be incorporating USB 3.0 support into A75 and A70M Fusion chipsets. The Ivy Bridge decision means that eventually Intel mainboard vendors won't have to use third party silicon to provide USB 3.0 support.
The announcement was made by Intel's Kirk Skaugen, VP and general manager of the firm's Data Centre Group, at Intel's Developer Forum in Beijing, and it represents another delay for the firm's adoption of a standard that it helped create. It had previously said that Ivy Bridge would be available in 2011.
Intel's Ivy Bridge is a 'tock' in the firm's 'tick-tock' release schedule and is expected to transition the company's fab technology to the 22nm node process. Ivy Bridge processors and chipsets had been expected to tip up late in 2011 with significant upgrades to the graphics core bringing DirectX 11 and OpenCL support, but Skaugen's comments suggest that Ivy Bridge will arrive in 2012.
It's not completely clear why Chipzilla has been so slow to adopt USB 3.0. Common sense suggested that Intel's January launch of the Sandy Bridge and Cougar Point products would have been the perfect timing to incorporate USB 3.0. Instead Intel has chosen to release its Light Peak bus, now known as Thunderbolt, which it co-developed with Apple in the latest Macbook Pro notebooks.
Intel's seemingly less than enthusiastic adoption of USB 3.0 could be seen as a ploy to promote Thunderbolt. However, Apple's advantage of being the only computer manufacturer with ultra-high speed connectivity looks like it will be short-lived, with both AMD and Intel now saying they will incorporate support for the bus in their chipsets. µ
Tags: Intel
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Intel's own motherboard line-up of 6-series chipsets already have 2x USB 3.0 ports.
So what will be the difference if its native or non-native!?
Do we really have to care if the USB 3.0 controller is soldered in a separate part of the motherboard & not in-built the chipset!?
Really!? It won't give any speed adavantage... USB 3.0 stuff is overpriced as it is.
Bring on Ivy Bridge already & stop with the bullshit.
Usb is flawed you do not get the full 5Gbps as a constant throughout put if you look at the reviews comparing it to Firewire 800, USB 3 is only slightly quicker!!!
USB is a master slave arcitecture!!! Which requires CPU use, it cannot carry video data and cannot support target disk mode
A thunderbolt port can also serve as a display port ..
Light peak was wholly developed by Intel, Apple only helped bringing it to market:
http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
Thunderbolt is External PCIe, mostly, so it will always depend on some PCIe-to-something-else protocol bridging. I think it has a pretty decent chance to survive, though.
Cheap external storage will keep on being eSATA or USB-based. Do eSATA or Thunderbolt-SATA bridged boxes support USB-style hotplugging? If not so, then it's USB 3.0, be it as is or via Thunderbolt-USB-SATA bridges.
In Intel's tick-tock strategy, Ivy Bridge is a tick, not a tock. Ticks are for a die shrink. Tocks are for a new architecture.
Chipsets, on the other hand, seem to fall under a hickory-dickory strategy.
Hey Inquirer,
You have a nasty typo in this article "transition the company's fag technology to the 22nm" I think you meant "fab". ;-)
-Brent
in this period of short-lived standards and massive competition among connectors, thunderbolt seems doomed.
when firewire was introduced into the mass market more than a decade ago, it didn't have any serious competitors. USB was crap until 3.0 and SCSI out of the financial reach of average consumers.
Nowadays Displayport, HDMI, Thunderbolt and USB3 are all in the race for the scarce real-estate on portable devices, and that's where the game is played today. is no room for 2-3 connectors there. just one.
Thunderbolt's only chance is to go pro and become standard connection in pro audio/video gear. TB<- MADI bridge anyone?