14 DAY TRIAL // While Intel and a number of other important computer hardware manufacturing companies announced at the Intel Developer Forum that a new Universal Serial Bus is in the making, just do not throw away all your USB 2.0 compliant hardware components, as the new iteration of the popular connectivity standard is still years away from becoming commercially available to the general consumers.
According to some information released by the promoters of the new standard, the USB 3.0 will come in as both a wired and a wireless protocol and the two versions will be compatible. In order to oversee the technical specifications of the new standard, a working group was formed and it is called the "SuperSpeed" USB Promoter Group and according to the news site everythingusb, this group hopes that the complete specifications will be available by mid 2008, while the bulk of the USB 3.0 complaint devices will hit the general consumer market by 2009. When thinking about how long it took the first USB protocol to gain some market acceptance, 2009 for the large scale adoption of a wholly new standard seems a little bit off.
While the second iteration of the USB protocol is merely an improvement over the first edition, the USB 3.0 is built from the ground up with a number of features in mind like backward compatibility, optical interfaces, very high data transferring speeds and much lower power consumption. The target speed of this new protocol is a huge 4.8Gb per second and while this may look like a lot now, in the near future, it may prove to be just the thing in order to connect to a host computer system a whole new range of peripherals.
As it must be backward compatible with the USB 2.0 standard, the USB 3.0 will come in both copper and optical variants and the hardware manufacturing company NEC said that in order to be able to sustain the fast speeds desired from it, the new protocol will cut its reach from 5 meters to only two and a half. Another good thing that will improve both the performance and the power saving features of this connectivity standard is the fact that the continuous polling for newly connected devices will be removed and this new standard will also allow virtual machines to connect to the USB 3.0 compliant devices without the need of a software middle layer.