USB 3.0: The Speed of Light Is Near

That simplistic looking wire that does it all from transfer our movies to portable drives and provide power for low consumption devices like our Blackberry’s, is getting an overhaul. After 7 years with no significant change, Intel has changed the future by unveiling its Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0.

Intel led the way with the UHCI back in the early days of the USB wars, and now they are leading the way to bring USB even more mainstream. Presently there are an estimated 2 billion USB devices available. Imagine how many of us have 3 or more devices that use that white/grey/black cable daily. Any of us that have purchased any new computer from the large chains recently, will notice that there are no more PS/2 ports, and plenty more USB ports. Most PC’s now carry a minimum of 4 in the back and two more front-end USB plugins for our iPods, Sidekick’s and Blackberry’s.

Needless to say, USB isn’t going anywhere and is getting a significant boost, with early estimates at 10 times the speed of 2.0. That’s going to put USB transferring speeds at 4.8 Gbit/s (600 MB/s). That’s one excessively large avi formatted movie file, a second. While in the near future, still in infancy as everyone from AMD to Microsoft is going to have it’s chance to review it now, and help to make revised xHCI 0.95 specification work and play well for easy adoption. The updated version of the specification will also be released uner RAND-Z licensing terms via an xHCI adopter’s agreement.

For those of us that just can’t wait a minute longer for our phones to back up, ipod to re-sync, and files to transfer for a friend… the age of seconds and not minutes is near. To read more about Intel, tune to Intel's About Section .

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email This

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry