USB 3.0 spec released

[questio verum]

Well, it's official. The USB 3.0 specification has been released for about a month now. It's available over at usb.org. for anyone wishing to peruse it. There's lot's of cool technical breakdowns in the spec release. But for the ADHD-afflicted among us, the Readers Digest condensed version is this: It's fast (about 10 times USB 2.0 speed) though that speed hasn't been realized in hardware yet. The signal path count will be bumped from 2 to 6, and data flow will become truly bi-directional. The level of power available to the bus will be raised, but it will be better managed. It will continue to use the same topology as USB 2.0 (tiered star). It's backward compatible, in that USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices can both be used on a USB 3.0 host. And what's cool, in addition; is that USB hosts will be comprised of a dual bus, so that plugging a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 host will not downgrade the speed and throughput of a USB 3.0 device plugged into the same host. Pretty cool stuff on the horizon. USB 3.0 devices should start trickling into the market sometime around mid-2009. By comparison, the release of the Firewire 3 standard was almost a non-event. Truly bizarre that a spec produced by a consortium of competitors would shut out a spec produced by a prestigious body such as the IEEE. Just goes to show, things are not always what you would expect.

In a related story, Intel is developing linux support for their USB 3.0 host controller. Guess I'll wait a little longer for that lappy purchase.

qv

[bigtomrodney]

That's pretty cool, I was wondering how that was coming along. It was appearing and disappearing in the news.

There's something funny about Firewire though. The spec is open but I think there was some caveat (or possibly cost) involved in using it. The two things that used to bug me about it were:-

• Sony and Apple owning the popular names for it (iLink and Firewire respectively)
• The requirement to use a controller on each device increased the cost of implementation.

I guess the fact that even Apple have abandoned Firewire means that it's too late in to resurrect it?

[oz]

USB seems to be about the hottest connection going, so if USB 3 turns out to be as good as it sounds, I'm thinking that trend might continue.