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USB 3.0 Is Coming

September 19, 2007 in Industry News comments 11

The Universal Serial Bus, which has grown to become a standard peripheral plug-and-play medium for about a decade, is about to get it's next upgrade since 2000. This latest upgrade adds a fiber optical wire greatly increasing data transfers by over ten times the speed from 2.0's 480 Mbit/s to 4.8 Gbit/s.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there's typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. A prototype shown at the speech is working now, and USB 3.0 will have optical and copper connections "from day one," he added.

The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second. Many devices don't need that much capacity, but some can use more, including hard drives, flash card readers and optical drives such as DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD. The fastest flash card readers today use IEEE 1394 "FireWire" connections that top out at 800 megabits per second.
DragoniteBallZ via crave.cnet.com »
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Most recently commented on by on Sep 20, 2007

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  • 0
    chaosmonkix Sep 19, 07
    great, wonder what the price will be =D
  • 0
    FRoGBuster Sep 19, 07
    maybe there will be less headset lag with 3.0 USB headsets???
  • 0
    regice Sep 19, 07
    that's great but the price...
  • 0
    Bale Fire Sep 19, 07
    Not bad, but hardly a revolution
  • 0
    DEZVOUS Sep 19, 07
    I'm not sure the price will be that outrageous. USB3.0 is a necessity.
  • 0
    DragoniteBallZ Sep 20, 07
    Optical wiring only costs like less than a dollar. On the contrary it would probably be much cheaper.
  • 0
    Final Blade Sep 20, 07
    High speed USB cables and such aren't that much so this should be cheap as well. But i don't see this as a major difference to 2.0.
  • 0
    tekmosis Sep 20, 07
    I remember when USB 2.0 came out it was like wheeeeeee. finalblade, you probably wont be able to tell the difference with things like keyboards, mice, etc. However, you will with external USB hard drives, dvd burners, and so forth. Firewire was kind of a flop as not that many things really took advantage of it over USB. However, there's also eSATA on the scene, now. If USB 3.0 can go at 4.8 gigabits per second I wonder how that compares to eSATA.
    • 0
      Final Blade Sep 20, 07
      I wasn't talking about keyboards, i was really talking about High Speed USB cables such as for MP3's PSP etc. But still i don't think its going to be much different......but i guess i will have to get one to see
  • 0
    Existenz Sep 20, 07
    It will be a huge difference when you get into larger capacity USB drives... I mean right now if you have 8Gb's on a USB 2.0 memory stick transfering that onto the computer or vice versa could take surplus of 5 minutes, with the 4.8Gb/s benchmark of USB 3.0 that could be done in 2 seconds.
  • 0
    chaosmonkix Sep 20, 07
    exactly, my best cord has been chewed up by my dog so now im stuck with a 10 minute wait for my terra to start when my desktop does as well.

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