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CyberPower Announces USB 3.0 and SATA 6G for Entire Gamer Xtreme line

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:08:12 -0600

Intel has drawn a lot of flak from various quarters for delaying the adoption of USB 3.0 and SATA-III. But lesser known players seem far more eager to make the leap to these new standards. CyberPower has decided to include USB 3.0 and SATA-III in all the upcoming models in its Gamer Xtreme range of desktops.

“CyberPower customers can configure and order a Gamer Xtreme system with the super speed USB 3.0/SATA III interface today. With Intel's latest i5/i7 processors and P55/X58 chipsets, you'll enjoy maximum performance today and be ready for tomorrow. Both USB 3.0 and SATA III are backward compatible to assure users their current peripherals will not become obsolete,” the company said in a laconic press release. The Gamer Xtreme range starts at $749.

Superspeed Will Drive USB Sales: In-Stat

Pulkit Chandna — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:20:47 -0500

The economic downturn has had a slight impact on shipments of USB-enabled devices. Market research firm In-Stat believes next-gen Superspeed technology (USB 3.0) will provide the necessary impetus to the sale of USB-enabled devices. The actual rate of growth will hinge on how quickly Superspeed technology replaces its predecessor in PC peripherals and consumer electronics.

"All PCs, and most PC peripherals have transitioned from full-speed to high-speed. Most of these devices will eventually transition to SuperSpeed, the only issue is the speed of the transition," said Brian O’Rouke, an analyst with In-Stat. As per In-Stat’s prognosis, Superspeed USB 3.0 devices will capture 25% of the USB market by 2013, with USB-enabled computer mice persisting as the most populous USB-enabled device category.

Hands-on with USB 3.0 -- SuperSpeed Earns its Name

Norman Chan — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:45:52 -0600

There's been a lot of buzz on the internet in the past few days about the speed of USB 3.0. Some sites are reporting that recent tests of the new standard are producing slower-than-expected results, and many readers are confused about how realistic the touted theoretical bandwidth of 5000 megabits/sec really is. We spoke with Jeff Ravencraft, President of the USB Implementer's Forum, (who also gave us our first look at USB 3.0 back at last year's IDF conference) to set the matter straight and get a demo of the latest SuperSpeed hardware in action.

When most people reference the speed of USB 2.0 (or HighSpeed), they typically cite 480mbit/sec. If you do the math (8 bits to a byte), that translates to 60Mb/sec data transfers. Of course, you'll never find any existing USB device that's able to transfer files at that speed -- the most we've gotten out of portable hard drives and USB keys ranges from 25-35MB/sec. Indeed, that's because 480mbit/sec is only the theoretical maximum bandwidth of USB 2.0.

With USB 3.0, the same distinction between theoretical and usable speeds applies. The technical limitation of SuperSpeed is 5000mbit/sec, more than ten times that of Highspeed. But we'll most likely never see file transfers topping 600MB/sec, and it's unreasonable to expect that we ever will. So where does the limitation lie? Much of it comes at the driver and application level, where software overhead is at fault. The new xHCI drivers are still in their infancy (only finalized several months ago), and won't be optimized for a long time to come. Additionally, the existing Mass Storage driver that's built into your OS was developed for the HighSpeed spec, and will probably be updated as SuperSpeed matures.

But even at this stage (and keep in mind that most consumers won't see USB 3.0 until the end of the year at the earliest), USB 3.0's demo speeds are truly impressive. Fresco Logic, one of the forum's partners that has developed a PCI-E xHCI Host card, demoed their setup for us. Data transfer along a 2 meter cord (3 meters is the maximum length allowed by the spec) showed speeds of up to 231MB/s writes and 256MB/s reads (simultaneously) when moving 64k packets. And when the signaling rate is measured directly at the link, we really do see speeds approaching the theoretical max.

As of now, the USB Implementer's Forum is approaching their promise of "10 times the speed of USB 2.0". With optimized hardware and software in the coming years, they expect that consumers will see speeds of 400-450MB/sec. But when even the fastest existing solid state drives can't output more than 250MB/sec, we think that you'll be more than happy with the usable speeds at USB 3.0's initial release.

Intel Makes Draft Spec on xHCI for USB 3.0 Available

Chris Moody — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:04:36 -0500

Toms Hardware reports that Intel’s "Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB" is now available. This is a good indicator that we might see the first USB 3.0 demonstrations at next week’s IDF in San Francisco.

xHCI draft specification provides hardware component designers, system builders and device driver developers with a description of the hardware/software interface between system software. It is being made available under RAND-Z (i.e. royalty free) licensing terms to all USB 3.0 Promoter Group and contributor companies that sign an xHCI contributor agreement.

It doesn’t appear that the new spec will be backward compatible past USB 2.0. I find it hard to believe that USB 1.1 devices will be out of luck, so I plan to keep an eye on that aspect. USB 3.0 at 600 MB/s will offer a ten-fold increase in the bandwidth of USB 2.0 at 4.8 Gb/s. That is pretty impressive if it approaches it’s spec yield. USB 2.0 spec rate is 480 Mbit/s but typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 280 Mbit/s.

Will you be wanting USB 3.0 on your future system?