Sep 10, 2008 2:26 PM | 2 Comments

With new spec 90% complete, Nathan Taylor delves into PCI Express 3.0 and USB 3.0 and what they'll mean for your system.

USB 3.0 was first talked about at last years IDF, and although there seemingly hasn’t been that much progress made in the last year, we’re still expecting to see PCs supporting the new standard perhaps late next year or early in 2010.

USB 3.0 spec 90% complete

According to Intel, the specs on USB 3.0 are about 90% complete, and it has already sent out a Host Controller Interface spec to hardware developers.

The original USB 3.0 spec called for a transfer rate ten times that of USB 2.0 – 4.8Gbps, although Intel’s recent literature is rounding that out to an even 5Gbps.

Speeds far from the original 369Mbps

At the recent IDF, Intel demonstrated USB 3.0 in action, though only at 369Mbps, a far cry from the official specified speed (and actually within the theoretical capabilities of USB 2.0).

Fun and games with new cabling

USB 3.0 will use a new type of cable that’s considerably thicker thanks to five new lines in it (the cable will be roughly the thickness of Ethernet copper). In spite of the new cables, it will still be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1.

The new lines in the cable allow full bi-directional communications along the USB cable – it can send data at the same time as receiving it – whereas before the USB cable could only operate unidirectionally, which meant timeslicing between send and receive messages.

Attached devices can "sleep"

Intel also claims USB 3.0 will be more power efficient thanks to a new signalling and interrupt protocol that lets attached devices “sleep” when not in use – the USB controller won’t hassle them or signal them at all.

It also appears likely (though we haven’t seen specs on this) that the new interface will provide a greater amount of power to attached devices.

PCI Express 3.0 doubles bandwidth of 2.0

The other technology that Intel was talking up at IDF was PCI Express 3.0, which is expected to double the bandwidth provided by PCIe 2.0 (and four times that of PCIe 1.0, which is what an awful lot of people are still using).

In total, PCIe 3.0 is expected to provide 10Gbps per link (with a given PCIe slot having one of more links, depending on the length of the slot, as before).

Given we haven’t yet seen products that max out the potential of PCIe 2.0, I doubt too many people will be clamouring for this particular upgrade. However, at the rate that video cards keep improving it may well prove necessary in the next few years.

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butterz Sep 14, 2008 2:32 PM

WOWWOWOW, this so cool - USB 3.0 sounds bloody good and hopefully out by 2010 :), PCI-Express 3.0 would also be as good, so cant wait!

totoaus Nov 14, 2008 4:11 PM

Yeah, the numbers make us drool, but then we read the small print to find it's vaporware, and will cost us to forklift upgrade our PCs. I remember being a field engineer for a multinational company. The salesman was always seeling the future next generation equipment and telling me that was his job. Funny though, the customers wanted to know what they could buy today, how it would solve their business issues, and what were the implications of purchaisng and using our gear. Yet another example proving something I read years ago. Not long after becoming the IBM CEO Lou Gerstner made this harsh judgement of the IT industry: "This industry's warped"! We still haven't learned.