USB 3.0 boosting the speed 10 times
The “SuperSpeed” USB Promotions Group was announced Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum. The promotions group will get together with contributors over the next year to finalize a USB 3.0 spec that will, they hope, take care of our wired peripheral and syncing needs for another five years or more. USB 3.0 is built upon, and is backwards-compatible with, the USB 2.0 “High Speed” spec. It would be generous to even call the specifications “early” at this stage, but the group still had lots of information about how USB 3.0 will work and what features it will provide. The spec should be finalized sometime in the middle of 2008, with initial devices available in ‘09, and broad deployment by 2010.
The main two goals of SuperSpeed USB are to provide a 10X boost in transfer rate (from 480-Mbits/s in USB 2.0 to 4.8 Gbits/s in USB 3.0), while dramatically lowering power consumption. One example of their speed goals is to transfer a 27GB HD movie to a portable device in 70 seconds. The same thing would take 15 minutes or more with HighSpeed USB (2.0). The SuperSpeed devices will use the same connectors and the same programming and device models as existing devices. Consider that it takes maybe one or two tenths of a second to transfer a typical 4 Mbyte song to a portable music player with today’s USB 2.0. That’s “fast enough” for some users, but just try to fill up that 80-Gbyte iPod and you might as well walk away and cook dinner while you wait: 3,000 songs would take perhaps 400 to 600 seconds – up to 10 minutes. Anyway, that’s still a good time considering today’s speed, isn’t it.
Source: Extremetech
First in.
Also, how could they possibly lower the power consumption while increasing the transfer speed? The signal level for one bit will plummet down and it could become an unreliable communication method…
To clarify the previous statement: If you have 480 million bits per second at 5 Volts and 0.5 Amps, one bit of information has one signal level strength. Then, if you have 4.8 billion bits per second at that same power level, a single bit only has one tenth of the original usb 2.0 signal strength. What will happen if they lower the power input/output on top of that? I hope those people know what they’re doing… Usually such weak signals incorporate strong error control/correction, which, in turn, demands expensive technology to be employed, while at the same time requiring considerable CPU time (but that might not be an issue by 2009…)
70 seconds for 27GB? Let’s do some simple maths, shall we:
27 (disk) GB = 27.000 (disk) MB.
27.000 / 70 seconds is more than 385 (disk) MB per second!
At that speed you can forget about “low power” and “portable”, you need a frickin’ disk array with ten disks or so to store 385MB/s sustained!
Anon-e-Moose,
USB doesn’t use TTL levels. If it did, it could likely never reach 480Mbps. It uses 0-300mV for logical low, and 2.8-3.6V for high (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB).
Also, the signalling doesn’t use 0.5A. The cable provides 0.5A @5V for the devices to be poered by, but that has nothing to do with the signalling levels or power.
Even so, it’s a moot point, as USB3 is supposed to add an optical link for these speeds - the electrical signalling is still to be USB2 compatible (even the cables are to be compatible).
70 seconds for 27GB? Let’s do some simple maths, shall we:
27 (disk) GB = 27.000 (disk) MB.
27.000 / 70 seconds is more than 385 (disk) MB per second!
At that speed you can forget about “low power” and “portable”, you need a frickin’ disk array with ten disks or so to store 385MB/s sustained!
Anon-e-Moose,
USB doesn’t use TTL levels. If it did, it could likely never reach 480Mbps. It uses 0-300mV for logical low, and 2.8-3.6V for high (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB) for low-speed mode (12Mbps I think) and +/- 400mV for high speed mode.
Also, the signalling doesn’t use 0.5A. The cable provides 0.5A @5V for the devices to be poered by, but that has nothing to do with the signalling levels or power.
Even so, it’s a moot point, as USB3 is supposed to add an optical link for these speeds - the electrical signalling is still to be USB2 compatible (even the cables are to be compatible).
Damn…
Sorry about the unintentional “spamming”. I blame the forum software, as I never got any indication the post had been accepted - not even that my click “Submit Comment” did anything at all.
Nice, can’t wait for these speeds!
the only thing faster than usb3 is yo mommas pants dropping to the floor when i walk in the room.
so whats the point of making usb3 soooo fast when hard drives can’t even go anywhere near that fast?
as all should know, usb is a SHARED BANDWIDTH protocol.
that means that you don’t get 480 mbps for every device, but for ALL devices together.
you don’t really get sustained 480 mbps throughput with todays flash drives - but suppose you get a HD camera, and you want to save the data to a usb harddrive - you need a LOT more!
Well theyre saying USB3 will be 4.8Gb/s and hard drives currently run at 3Gb/s so were not far off, and by the time USB3 is released, then there will be news of SATA III and so USB3 wont be antiquated before its even out.
Looking for Demonoid invites? email me at blazing_bazooka@yahoo.com and we will work out a deal for a green at a free ipod site.
People like #8 should really learn how to read and apply critical thinking:
“……a USB 3.0 spec that will, they hope, take care of our wired peripheral and syncing needs for another five years or more”
You don’t build technology so that its maximum potential can be used today, you future proof it so that as other technology improves yours doesn’t become obsolete or the dreaded “choke point”……..duh.
I think that you guys are dreamers, so go to sleep with the sheep!
I think you guys are a bunch of dreams, so go to sleep with the sheep!
I think by the power consumption they mean that a device wont have to be turned on as long.
Lets say you have to plug in your 500GB drive to do an entire server image backup and it takes 1 hour and a half and the drive consumes 0.1KW/H. Now if it only takes 6 minutes to do that transfer that 0.1KW/H you did not use as much power as you could go turn it off and unplug it in a timely matter.
(note: all numbers are made up and just examples)
so what will use 4.8Gbit/sec and be larger then 27Gb?
only answer thats viable imo is Intels new flash stuff their working on, maybe they expect their stuff to be fast and large
in witch case i would scream OMFG and buy tons of it!
I wonder, in 2-3 years time, how many devices will still be wired anyway?
I think most of my stuff on my computer still uses usb 1.0 :/.
I’l show you later
-Well theyre saying USB3 will be 4.8Gb/s and hard drives -currently run at 3Gb/s so were not far off, and by the time -USB3 is released, then there will be news of SATA III and so -USB3 wont be antiquated before its even out.
Todays regular hard drives can’t reach the speed of SATA1 1.5 Gbps. I’m talking about sustained writing speed. 15k might, i don’t know.
@pedobear:
Sup /b/?
Also, fail - misspell.
pedobead, your name means fart bear, anyway, I believe that usb3 will be true and fall forward with technology, which this is a big step into the fast streaming and downloading of high definition content. peace!
It all depends on the acceptance of the hw manufacturers… take a look at PCI-X! It’s out for how many years, and ppl still have to buy PCI hw.
For HD’s this is as useful as the SATA interface, as in, it’s not. Even the 15k drives can barely scratch the 80mb/s sustained transfer speeds. The new solid state drives are fast, and then, there are RAM drives. This is, however, useful in the digital imaging. Currently most industrial scanners use SCSI, which is annoying. They might switch to USB3 if it’s fast enough.
Other cool applications could be RAM Work Drives, though, I think it’s going to be a bit too slow for that. Actually now that I think about it, the USB3 will be too fast for HDs and to slow for most anything else. Perhaps some further thought on the subject is needed.
USB hard disks will finally be more useful