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Intel Developers Demo USB 3.0 Throughput On Linux

Posted by timothy on from the future-sweetness dept.

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."

1 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. What's in a name... by alain94040 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/