Intel Releases USB 3.0 Controller Interface Spec

hardsky submitted thrilling news about everyone's favorite interconnect cable by saying "USB 3.0 is set to deliver data-transfer speeds of up to 5Gb/s, initially over tweaked connectors and wiring and, later, over optical links."

Comments

One Question

[pandrijeczko]

Does USB 3.0 assist in the more rapid delivery of porn to my PC?

If the answer is "Yes", then please continue with your announcement.

Re:One Question

[cerberusss]

Does USB 3.0 assist in the more rapid delivery of porn to my PC?

Why, yes of course! The internet tubes will be replaced with USB 3.0, which is easily done because USB hubs are very cheap. When this is done, everybody will have 5 Gb/s!

Sigh

[Tyler Eaves]

Still the same symmetrical plug design....stupid, stupid move. Would have been that hard to add a ridge on one side or something, so you don't have to stare at the end??

Re:Sigh

[Seraph787]

yea we know its but here are the reasons its needed 1) Backwards compatible 2) Fit more ports in a smaller area, less wasted space 3) Cheaper for manufactures because the mounts are the same thus making it a cheaper industry upgrade to adopt.

Re:Sigh

[heffrey]

Most UBB connectors have a USB symbol on one side which means (this side up). I'd never really thought about this until someone gave me an iPod. I then found that I was forever struggling to get the connector in.

What I concluded was happening was:

1. I'd sub-consciously worked out that the connector is inserted USB symbol up.
2. The Apple USB connector has the USB symbol on, but on the other side it has an Apple symbol.
3. My sub-conscious was in fact not distinguishing between USB symbol and Apple symbol. Instead the logic was something like, "that side has a symbol on, I'll put it facing upwards".

I'm quite sure that the "symbol faces up" convention is a part of the USB spec. I never needed to know this because my brain naturally worked it out without it ever entering my consciousness. This is a truly wonderful piece of human interface design and yet those morons from Apple go and break it with an inane piece of branding. Way to go Apple. Anyone who ever thinks that Apple cares about usability should think again.

Re:Sigh

[ChrisMP1]

If it takes you more than two tries to put in a USB plug, you probably shouldn't be allowed near a computer anyway.

Re:Sigh

[91degrees]

Never had this:

Try the correct way.
Try the other way.
Try the correct way again.
Look at plug
Insert screwdriver to bend plug back into shape
Try the correct way.

Re:Sigh

[MyLongNickName]

If you push hard enough, it will go in the wrong way as well.

Re:Sigh

[Intron]

What. You've never had plug rage? The last time was trying to get the power plug off a 10-year old hard drive. It seemed to have been superglued.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what she said.

Re:Sigh

[andrewd18]

You've never had plug rage?

Please stay away from my computers. Thanks.

Re:Sigh

[hey!]

I once worked with a guy who just broke things. We'd have the same laptop, and after about three months his had cracks in the case, missing keys, and half-torn out power connector. Mine would be pristine after over a year and a half, except the paint on the keycaps would be worn off.

The guy wasn't dumb or irresponsible, or even clumsy. He was just rough with machines.

Some people have a lighter touch with machines than others. My car is a standard, and when my wife drives it I wince every time she shifts and the transmission makes a "kerr-lunk" noise. When it's time shift she just steps on the clutch and shoves the shifter from one position to another. She doesn't take that tiny fraction of an instant to feel that point where the gears will mesh smoothly and silently or bother to get the engine RPMS just right.

It's not that our value systems are different or anything like that; we both regard the car as a way to get from point A to point B and other than that just an inconvenience. It's that she doesn't have that kind of unconscious awareness of what the car is up to that most drivers do.

Connectors of all sorts are sources of trouble in the real world. I've worked on mobile applications, and you wouldn't believe the difference in longevity of PDAs with a cradle and those that have to be plugged into a cable. I've seen tons of problems with proprietary connectors on cell phones. I've seen CF card slots torn off their PCBs by vigorous card insertion. Now I could probably insert a CF card ten times a day for ten years straight and never once do anything like that, but there are plenty of people who will do this, reliably, within a hundred insertions or so.

Connectors ought to be completely bulletproof and foolproof, simple to connect and disconnect, tolerant of rough or sloppy connection or disconnection, tolerant of accidental disconnection (as when a cable is snagged), but stay securely connected otherwise, and work consistently for thousands and thousands of connections and disconnections. Oh, yes, and if it goes on the end of the cable, a large person should be able to step on it without damaging it. That's a tall order, and no connector is perfect, but many connectors, particularly proprietary connectors, are truly awful.

Motorola for years on some of their phones had a connector that had teeny tiny little spring clips that were supposed to mate with teeny tiny little holes (if I recall) on the receptacle. This was,I suppose, supposed to give the connectors a positive lock. That was a stupid idea unless the receptacle is built like a piece of climbing equipment, but what was worse was that it was mushy and didn't give any tactile or auditory feedback. So people just shoved the cables in and yanked them out. Most of the cables I saw had the little spring clips broken off or bent after a month or two. Many of the phones had damaged receptacles and seriously bent or even ripped out connectors weren't unheard of -- from one of those rare occasions when the connectors did lock together.

The six pin firewire and full size USB "B" (device end) connectors are pretty good. The four pin Firewire and full size USB "A" (master end) connectors are middling-lousy. The mini-USB connectors on some PDAs and phone are reasonable, and a huge improvement over some of the proprietary connectors they often replace. I don't know about the USB EMU type connectors.

Barrel type power connectors are usually pretty good, although in some cases they are susceptible to causing equipment damage during accidental disconnect (the classic foot tangled in the power cord scenario). Some of them are fine, others tend to take a bit of the device with them when they go. There really ought to be a break away plug design where you plug a small flexible extension into things like laptops, unless the cord and connectors are designed to survive a strong sideways tug.

In any case, it's too damned bad that the type A connector is being kept. It's not the worst connector in common use. It's probably OK to plug your printer into your PC once and leave it there. But it's too fragile (both the male and female) for field use where connections are made frequently.

Great!

[iminplaya]

Will we ever see a storage medium that can move data that fast?

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter. It is a universal serial BUS.

This means that traffic to and from many slower storage devices can share the path so any speed increase is still a good thing, right?

Re:Great!

[Seraph787]

simple answer: yes

Complicated answer:
Progress is inevitable and we definitely need that kind of speed. Its not only about hard drives but also about Audio visual components. Such as an USB HDTV Dongle which is a bit slow for USB 2.0. It is also one of the reasons why webcams currently max out at 2.0 megapixels. anything more than that the current USB 2.0 cannot handle. It is quite easy to eat through those 600MB/s, Just think of the USB 3.0 replacing 1000mbit ethernet.

My god

[Centurix]

My humping USB dog will be a blur!

Embossing

[tepples]

Yes, the USB connector is blind accessible. The "top" of the A plug's plastic part is supposed to be embossed with a USB logo, and the "bottom" isn't supposed to be embossed. So if you know which way is "up" on your PC's connector, or if you are using a hub (in which case up is more obvious), you can more easily plug them in blind.

Re:Embossing

[Mattsson]

The problem is that the host-connector has no markings, and sometimes "up" might be either left, right, up or down relative the up of the device itself.

What they should have done, from the beginning of USB, was to have the connector truly symmetric, so that you could plug it in either way.

Re:Embossing

[Tihstae]

Seriously, how many connectors out there do you know of that let you plug it in any way you feel like?

Vagina is the first one that comes to my mind.

Re:Embossing

[Mhtsos]

For starters, my car keys.

Yes, they're for starters.

*ducks* sorry, couldn't help it.

Everyone's Favorite?

[vjmurphy]

"hardsky submitted thrilling news about everyone's favorite interconnect cable..."

Don't know about anyone else, but my favorite interconnect cable is something very, very, different.

Re:Everyone's Favorite?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Mini-USB!

Re:Everyone's Favorite?

[pandrijeczko]

At my age, mine's suffering from increased attenuation due to conductor degradation, high signal to noise ratio & the image goes all fuzzy when I wiggle it.

Re:Come On

[Hal_Porter]

Damn it.

Three edits later, and it still makes no sense. I obviously meant to say "If not even the editor posting a stroy is interested".

[Goes to hide in a corner until he's able to type again.]

Hvae you seen taht rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy taht syas it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

Re:Come On

[jgtg32a]

While that is true, I showed that to my GF who is from Hong Kong and knows English as a second language, cannot do it at all, but she can read perfectly and a bit faster than me

Where is the "standars" body

[bogaboga]

From the actual body of the story...

Intel has provided chipset makers with a draft specification for a USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Interface (XHCI), making good a promise it made a couple of months ago.

I thought we had a standards body that would release such a spec to developers. This development in my opinion, might have other chip makers release a "renegade USB 4.0" promising new features and the like.

Question is; is it up to manufacturers to think of ideas, name them and release these to the general public? What's up with IEEE Standards group, whose global standards include Biomedical and Healthcare, Nanotechnology, Information Technology and Information Assurance among others?

Re:Where is the "standars" body

[TheRaven64]

I think you are confusing USB with FireWire. FireWire is the IEEE 1394 family of standards (letter suffixes indicating later versions with higher speeds). USB is an interface developed by Intel to help them sell faster CPUs.

Re:Where is the "standars" body

[Areyoukiddingme]

There is a USB standards group, of which Intel has historically been the driving force. The various USB logos are trademarks of that group, so any "renegade" claiming to have USB 4.0 would be committing a trademark infringement if they tried to decorate it using recognized symbols and logos.

USB remains one of the great industry success stories, designed by Intel and then licensed out at extremely low prices with a very inclusive policy. USB gained as much traction as it did because Apple used to insist on upwards of $1 in royalties per chip implementing Firewire, on top of the difficulty of implementing Firewire in the first place. The margins on peripheral chipsets are so low that there was no way to manufacture cheap Firewire devices at those prices. They still want too much in royalties even today, which is why budget motherboards never include Firewire, and no low-end devices connect using Firewire. Ever seen a Firewire flash drive?

Meanwhile Intel understands the concept of a truly mass market, and designed a simpler standard that uses less silicon to implement and less money for permission to implement. The price is higher CPU usage, since USB chips don't do very much work. Then Intel was clever enough to grab a golden opportunity and create a higher speed extension to the standard that suddenly brought it squarely in contention with Firewire, while being totally backwards compatible. Firewire answered, with Firewire 400, but without USB pushing them, they probably wouldn't have bothered to create a higher speed Firewire. Now Firewire 800 is on its way out, but going up against USB 3 at up to 5X the speed, while still having liberal licensing terms. Is it any wonder that camcorder manufacturers are jumping ship and abandoning Firewire?

Not ready.

[tikram]

I am personally waiting for USB 3.11 for Workgroups to come out before upgrading.

Re:Come On

[PIBM]

it might be because the characters aren't normal for her, since english is my second language and it's not a problem at all, but I use the same set of letters.

Re:Come On

[neokushan]

That's a lie and you know it. Nobody on slashdot has a girlfriend.

eSATA?

[amcdiarmid]

I'm certain that USB3 will be "supposed to be" backward with USB 1; 1.1; 2, but will likely only be backwards compatible with 2. Right now, a Hard disk cannot keep up with eSATA at 1.5 Gb/s, nevermind eSATA at 3Gb/s. For the past year or so, many of us have been buying $15 eSATA cards for our old computers, and new computers with eSATA built in. Considering that external HD cases with eSATA connectors cost only about $16 (something with 4 eggs, at Newegg) what is the benefit?

Possible benefits would be increased transfer speed to peripheral devices, but can we reasonably expect devices that fast by then? Personally, I would hope that 10Gb/s ethernet would come down in price by then. The only real benefit I see with the proposed USB3 is something for a processor core to do....

$.02

PS: I will give a possible something to do mention to Hard Disk (Solid-State) video recorders... but they could use eSATA as well & still be saturated..

Re:Come On

[Anonymous Coward]

You know firefox has a build in spell check these days, you might want to look into that.

Oh the irony...

Re:Come On

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*. mod parent up.

Re:Come On

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a girlfriend, you insensitive clod!

Why?

[thatskinnyguy]

Why do we need USB 3? The reason for my question is e-SATA. Why not pump more into development of devices that run on that interface instead of USB?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Come On

[Kristoph]

Yes but the point is, no one on Slashdot HAS a girlfriend ...

Or ... err ... are you a girlfriend with a girlfriend on slashdot ... because that would be like ... whoa!

;-)

Re:Where is FireWire going?

[TheRaven64]

It's not a huge limitation for USB since devices just include a USB host controller as well. This allows, for example, a USB camera to print to a USB printer. The main win for FireWire is the lower protocol overhead (meaning that it gets closer to the rated wire speed) and the lower CPU usage.

Re:Come On

[Dolda2000]

You know firefox has a build in spell check these days, you might want to look into that

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.