Intel Developers Demo USB 3.0 Throughput On Linux

Sarah Sharp writes "Intel's Open Source Technology Center is working on USB 3.0 support for Linux. USB 3.0 has wire speeds of 5Gbps and promises to be 10 times faster than USB 2.0. A recent video demo shows speeds that are 3.5 times faster than USB 2.0. The USB 3.0 drivers will be submitted to the mainline kernel when the eXtensible host controller interface (xHCI) specification reaches a 1.0 release."

Comments

What's in a name...

[alain94040]

USB 2.0 gave us high-speed and full-speed. Some marketing department had to work really hard on the USB 3.0 specs, to come up with... super-speed.

Now let's talk about the obvious problem: at 5 Gbit/s, it's faster than the Ethernet in my house (1 Gbit/s). Am I the only one who didn't really notice a 10X speed improvement when moving from 100 Mbit Ethernet to gigabit Ethernet? Conventional hard drives are just too slow.

Maybe SSD + USB 3.0 would be really cool. Imagine a Flash based HD camera talking to a Flash based hard drive. Is 2009 the year of the Flash?

Which brings me back to my original point: for the next generation USB, I propose the name flash-speed :-)

PS: thanks to Intel for helping Linux stay on the leading edge. It looks like Linux may even support this before Windows, thanks to the Windows 7 schedule... I just wish Intel's pre-conditions on contributing to the xHCI specs didn't start with stuff like:

Step 1. Print and execute the xHCI Contributor agreement. Note: The agreement must be executed by a corporate officer.

--
http://fairsoftware.net/

Re:What's in a name...

[Microlith]

This is why Intel is pushing USB: it is entirely CPU dependent.

You won't notice it when you're running with X * 2 logical cores. It'll be shuffled off to some low utilization core.

Re:Wha?

[Lost Engineer]

USB 2.0 requires the host to control all communication on the bus, and in practice uses more CPU time than something like 1394. I don't know if they changed this in USB3 or not.

Re:Motherboards

[kklein]

Please don't say "rig."

Re:cool, at least it is progress

[TheRaven64]

So is FireWire400, once you subtract the protocol overhead from both. Will USB 3 be faster than FireWire800 (which I have been using for the last few years) in real world use? And will FireWire3200 be shipping by the time USB3 is found in real products?

Re:Wha?

[yoyhed]

Yup the host sets up a structure in memory which lists all the USB endpoints. When a driver wants to do some IO it asks the host controller driver which adds a request into the structure with a pointer to a buffer. The host controller hardware reads the structure with busmaster DMA and generates the USB packets. When the device answers the host controller DMAs the data into the the driver's buffer interrupts the CPU. Then the host controller can pass the buffer back to the driver. Polling is done by leaving the request in the structure, it doesn't require any CPU activity. Intel like USB because they invented it, not as some sort of conspiracy to load your CPU.

I know it's off-topic, but I thought I'd point out why I love Slashdot by comparing it to Digg. If this story were on Digg, the comments would be something like "I BET THIS BE ON NEXT MACBOOK PRO LOL". Here, we get something like your comment in the first thread. <3 /.