USB 3.0 Gets Cheaper Early Next year

One obstacle that the latest USB standard has to surpass before truly becoming mainstream is pricing, and this might just happen early next year if recent rumors turn out to be true.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology has already established itself as the latest best thing on the I/O industry.

Naturally, this is because of its simply massive performance advantage over its predecessor (about ten times the speed).

The fame of the USB 3.0 is not what recent reports are concerned with, however, not directly at least.

What the most recent rumors in this area speak of is the likeliest time when prices will get lower than they are at the present time.

With native chipset support no longer lacking, affordability will determine the rate of growth, marketing-wise.

Seeing as how all it takes for a product to have USB 3.0 is a controller chip, this means that makers of such processors are, ultimately, those who will dictate when and by how much the interface gets cheaper.

As users may or may not know, Renesas Electronics is the prime supplier of SuperSpeed controllers, although it did lose some clients after the earthquake in Japan.

ASUS ordered from ASMedia, for instance, while Gigabyte looked to Etron, though neither actually stopped calling on Renesas.

Digitimes says that one can expect a price cut to the latter's USB 3.0 controller ICs sometime during the early parts of next year (2012).

The report actually gave a figure for people to get a more or less clear idea of things. US$1.20 will replace the current $2 mark (for 2-port controller chips). By contrast, ASMedia sells its own for US$1.50-1.70.

In the meantime, one can be certain that the worldwide collection of USB 3.0-enabled motherboards, storage units (SSDs, HDDs, flash drives), laptops, card readers, etc., will only keep growing.