SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Promises 10Gbps Data Transfers, Coming in 2014

DJJAZZYJET said:

and we need 10gb data transfer for what exactly.

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To support future data speeds maybe?

Think about the past, we used to get along fine on a 56k modem. Now that wouldn't do anything but load an IM client. As time goes on so does quality and quality comes for a price. You need to upgrade speeds on our data transferring to cope with the data increase that comes with quality. Imagine if we were still on USB1, taking raw photos off a camera would be an afternoon process. Scanning at 1600dpi would break the computer, video import I don't even want to think about. We are getting 4k TVs these days that means 1080p which you are probably used to will look like dog poop. You want to import 4k resolution footage from your gopro hero 3 over USB2? Nah you don't, the battery wouldn't outlast the transfer hahahaha

Nermal said:

Shouldn't this be USB 3.1?

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I'm thinking USB 3G - or better yet, USB 3S.

Can we find out which stupid engineer(s) designed the USB3 device-end connector?

I've already seen four of these broken in USB3 devices (broke one myself). That thin blade plug design is much too fragile.

You better be very careful with the connectors on those USB3 external drives!

iKanit said:

I use Macbook Retina, but I less prefer Thunderbolt. How can you accept interface system which cost you $59 only for a cable?

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Thunderbolt cables cost $49.00 each with free shipping.

DJJAZZYJET said:

and we need 10gb data transfer for what exactly.

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Call me crazy for thinking this but for faster data transfers for large files?

Don't let the screen door hit 'ya where the good Lord split ya!

Buh-bye Thunderbolt. It was nice knowing you. Or not.

Actually, only a very tiny number of people got to know you. Oh well. Those folks can throw their Thunderbolt cables into the drawer beside the old FireWire cables.

Axemantitan said:

I much prefer Thunderbolt. It has much lower CPU usage, and can be used to connect displays. That's not the case for USB.

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Absolutely! Those fools who like USB have to put up with a a CPU spike as they choose from thousands of unique-low-cost devices while us TB pure-breds can choose from a dozen or so devices-many do the same thing!

USB cables are too damn cheap too! Why, if I do't have to pay $49 for a cable it just isn't worth it.

Hoo-yeah!

We rock!

Tech198 said:

Make ya wonder now, if this is true, why Apple decided to keep Thunderbolt. They must of know its not as popular..

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Popularity is driven by adoption. Adoption is largely driven by cost. The cost of Thunderbolt is much higher than USB right now.

Do you remember the early days of USB? PCs had USB ports, but none were using them, for years. It wasn't until Apple put USB into Macs and made it the standard port for keyboards, mice and printers that the rest of the industry eventually switched to it, too.

Thunderbolt is not, and never will be, a replacement for USB. Speed and implementation are two different things. SuperSpeed USB 3.0 may claim the same 10Gps that Thunderbolt can achieve today, but will you see 100 foot USB cables like there is for Thunderbolt optical today? No.

Both types of ports can co-exist. There is a valid argument for why USB needs to be running at 10Gbps... it definitely seems to be an advancement directly targeting Apple's push of Thunderbolt as a superior protocol.

Nothing wrong with advancing a technology and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

There is a reason those Thunderbolt cables are $50 ...

They are a tuned transmission line with active termination at each end for data speed and reliability.

Try running data at that speed over a 3 meter cable and see what you end up with at the other end without that technology in the cable.

simsaladimbamba said:

Speaking of drives and HDs, they are most often still a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and offer slow speeds compared to SSDs.

.....

In other words, TB is not really that slow to offer advantages over USB 3.0 or Firewire 00, to use it as backup tool.

But then again, those are just numbers, hell I do not even have a 2011 or 2012 Mac, so I am still using "old" technology.

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It is not about now, it is about the next 5 years since you need a faster and improved interface before you have the products ready to take advantage of those speed.

We need USB 3.0 and TB ready and implemented into systems long before we regret not having them in the first place.

Good backup systems are the ones where you can use dual or more disk redundancy, like raid5 with 4 drives and above. You can easily get above 200mbps throughput from those systems now. Imagine what you can get in 5 years from now.

Also imagine the SSDs 5 years from now, you will able to get 512gb TLC SSD for less than $200 or even less. Throw 4 of these in a backup system and you can get 1GBps out of it, which is what 10Gbps USB 3 or TB can do.

TMar said:

It IS possible to do display over USB and are we back in the USB 1.0 days? Really CPU usage?

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You do understand that USB requires your CPU to do the handling and stuff, right?

Which means the more stuff you do across all USB ports, the more cores you need to throw at it. You will also face latency lags as CPU is not optimized for the tasks that USB does whereas TB has most of the workload done on the controller's side without requiring much from the CPU.

That is why display over USB is not that good, high CPU and latency makes it difficult to do real-time stuff.

APlotdevice said:

Thunderbolt will at the very least remain popular in the professional world, just as FireWire did for a many years.

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"Remain popular"??? T-Bolt is popular in Apple fan fantasies, but not in the market.

dblissmn said:

Doesn't look good for Thunderbolt.

Leave it to Apple to take a standard that is even farther ahead of USB 3 than Firewire was ahead of USB 2, and yet drive it even farther into the ditch than they ever drove FireWire.

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"T-Bolt" == "Firewire II"

Tech198 said:

I dunno.. Maybie movies, Actually, i think its mostly just porno.

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Those 4K pornos need the bandwidth, for sure.

Aidan5806 said:

While USB 3.0 is more widely used than Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt is still the better technology, on performance and practicality. Thunderbolt has a much larger variety of uses, beyond just data transfer (i.e. High res Display out, external graphics support, support for other port types through adapters, ect.) as well as offering high throughput. The majority of thunderbolt buses are quad channel and thunderbolt is bidirectional, with a max throughput of 80gbps. This new USB standard still wont come close to that versatility.

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And VHS was more widely used than Betamax, but Betamax was the better technology.

Those who don't learn from history....

nicehhan said:

The way I look at it, Firewire died out, in part, because it just doesn't fit in modern laptops, while also because Firewire didn't have a bit user base. TB has a smaller connector than USB and, with Intel behind it, could easily become widely used, much more so than Firewire. TB also has a much wider range of uses than USB. I wouldn't be so quick to write it off.

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Even Apple's "form over function" laptops have room for USB ports - what do you mean?

APlotdevice said:

It won't have to be. Like FireWire, Thunderbolt is going to be the preferred choice for all sorts of high end hardware. As our have already pointed out, in practice Thunderbolt is already much faster... it's 10GB/s per lane, with four lanes (two each way)... and doesn't put as much strain on the CPU.

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You mean 10 Gb/s ("GB/s" means 10^9 bytes per second, whereas "Gb/s" means 10^9 bits per second).

And how is T-Bolt at 10 Gb/s "much faster" than the new 10 Gb/s USB proposal?

hfg said:

I bet we see a lot of confusion with consumers, who will try to connect together a mixture of USB-2, USB-3, and SuperSpeed components, cables, computers, etc. and wonder why it all isn't working as expected. I believe there is even an issue with USB-3 hubs in the order in which USB-2 and USB-3 devices are plugged in which can limit transfer speeds to that of the slower USB-2 device.

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Wow - what a trip to the wayback machine.

I should quote all the 1394 fans here in MacRumours who claimed that USB 2.0 was doomed because consumers would be confused by issues of incompatible hubs and cables and ports.

It. Didn't. Happen. 1394 died, and USB ruled.

iGrip said:

Buh-bye Thunderbolt. It was nice knowing you. Or not.

Actually, only a very tiny number of people got to know you. Oh well. Those folks can throw their Thunderbolt cables into the drawer beside the old FireWire cables.

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Not that fast... The new USB speeds match TB but needs new controllers. So you might have to get rid of your Mac and buy a new one.

I have two thunderbolt drives. A portable Buffalo and a Raid Lacie and can't be happier. They work fine and fast!

iGrip said:

Buh-bye Thunderbolt. It was nice knowing you. Or not.

Actually, only a very tiny number of people got to know you. Oh well. Those folks can throw their Thunderbolt cables into the drawer beside the old FireWire cables.

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I still use an external hard drive connected and powered by Firewire 400 today, and it works like a champ. Firewire is an amazing protocol that has proven itself over the years. It may have been poorly implemented in terms of future-proofing (ie. different port design for FW 800), which hurt its longevity, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a great protocol.

I think they learned something with Thunderbolt and I fully expect that protocol to evolve and the port itself won't change. That's because the on-cable connectors take on much of the payload that is built into USB and Firewire port electronics. That does make for a more complicated implementation, and more expensive cables, but also makes the actual on-device ports simpler in a sense.

Thunderbolt is not going anywhere, so you can take your cynical attitude out the door with ya...

I think I'll skip the Super Speed USB and wait for Super Duper Speed USB. I bet it will be worth the wait.

Meh, I have those speeds readily available on my iMac's Thunderbolt ports now. Of course, it would help if I had Thunderbolt equipped devices that I can use...

AidenShaw said:

And how is T-Bolt at 10 Gb/s "much faster" than the new 10 Gb/s USB proposal?

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There's a lot I could say about your responses, but I'll focus on the one above...

Anybody with any knowledge and experience with Firewire knew that it was far more robust at sustained data transfer speeds than USB was. USB may have claimed certain speeds, but it wasn't able to sustain those speeds as well as Firewire did. I fully expect the same to play out for Thunderbolt vs. SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

Claimed speeds ≠ real-world performance.

Another way to look at it... your home cable connection may be pegged at 50Mbps downlink, but as soon as all of your neighbours get online and start sharing the same lanes, the speeds drop dramatically. The protocols managing that traffic are really what matter, not just how fast they can transfer data under optimal conditions (ie. no neighbours online).

So the real question is - how well will SuperSpeed USB 3.0 perform in real-world heavy traffic situations?

And Macs will get this in about 2 years, probably. We just got USB 3.0 in the latest generation of everything.

hfg said:

There is a reason those Thunderbolt cables are $50 ...

They are a tuned transmission line with active termination at each end for data speed and reliability.

Try running data at that speed over a 3 meter cable and see what you end up with at the other end without that technology in the cable.

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Well it seems the USB consortium has managed it, and the USB 3 cables at least aren't $49 each.

Apple really has another FireWire on its hands here, TB is a great protocol, pretty much the ultimate as it's PCIe on a single cable. However, FireWire was also a great protocol, but its adoption was pretty poor. Outside of video cameras, you had to specifically search to get a HDD (or pretty much anything else) with FireWire. FW800 was even rarer.

Apple/Intel should be subsidising the cost of the TB chip if they really want it to take off. Alternatively, Intel should have produced a set of cheap, small cut down TB chips, each a bridge for one protocol. For example, TB -> SATA, TB -> USB3, TB -> Ethernet, etc. 90% of applications don't need the huge complexity and expense of the standard TB chip, because 90% of applications don't need USB, Ethernet and SATA ports all in one device. External hard drives for example could use a cheap TB -> SATA as they do with USB.

Also, the standard TB bridge chip is somewhere around $25, thats a significant chunk of the cost of an external HDD. The equivalent USB 2 chip is $1, USB 3 is about $5.

USB 3 Interference

I just purchased a Mac Mini and a USB 3 drive. The interference of the USB 3 kills the wifi of the mini and functions of the wireless mouse. I had to return the drive for a thunderbolt. There's an Intel White Paper documenting the problem (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...al-bus/usb3-frequency-interference-paper.html). The warranty-disabling fix for the interference is pretty severe (http://blog.macsales.com/15990-shielding-resolves-usb-3-0-conflict-with-bluetooth).

I also purchased a USB 3 card reader to download images- it's not "compatible" with Mac USB 3. It's been a long time since connectivity compatibility has been an issue.

No wonder it took Apple so long to adopt this interface. It's not ready for prime-time.

DJJAZZYJET said:

and we need 10gb data transfer for what exactly.

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Imagine if all engineers had that mindset

Elijahg said:

Well it seems the USB consortium has managed it, and the USB 3 cables at least aren't $49 each.

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Also, the standard TB bridge chip is somewhere around $25, thats a significant chunk of the cost of an external HDD. The equivalent USB 2 chip is $1, USB 3 is about $5.

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The costs will continue to drop down over time as more companies get onboard. Intel and a few other companies are already working on a smaller TB controller that'll halve the costs and so on.

The USB consortium haven't managed it without the CPU spikes. There's a reason a lot of people keep saying there's a CPU usage issue when stress-loading the USB ports such as high-speed transfers or video streaming such as video cameras and so on. However, majority of people don't put a lot of USB devices at the same time on their computers, so it's not really a problem, that's why USB took over quickly.

For people who does a lot of things over USB such as high-speed external drives, cameras (live recording/editing works), and so on, USB can slow down the system as it consume more of the available CPU resources.

By offloading the USB protocol handling to the CPU and thus making the cables and controller much cheaper, your system takes up the slack to make those USB devices fast. The more USB devices you have, the more CPU usage is going to increase. TB doesn't have that problem because it's done on the controller's side, that's why the cables and the chips are expensive. It is never going to be as cheap as USB.

coolfactor said:

There's a lot I could say about your responses, but I'll focus on the one above...

Anybody with any knowledge and experience with Firewire knew that it was far more robust at sustained data transfer speeds than USB was. USB may have claimed certain speeds, but it wasn't able to sustain those speeds as well as Firewire did. I fully expect the same to play out for Thunderbolt vs. SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

Claimed speeds ≠ real-world performance.

Another way to look at it... your home cable connection may be pegged at 50Mbps downlink, but as soon as all of your neighbours get online and start sharing the same lanes, the speeds drop dramatically. The protocols managing that traffic are really what matter, not just how fast they can transfer data under optimal conditions (ie. no neighbours online).

So the real question is - how well will SuperSpeed USB 3.0 perform in real-world heavy traffic situations?

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All I can say is that your post is all FUD, no facts.

You have no information about 10 Gbps USB, yet you dredge up old USB 1.1 vs 1394a data to discredit it.

And when my neighbours get online, it doesn't affect me a bit. I pay for QOS that puts my packets at a higher priority than theirs.

Fail. Fail.

12dylan34 said:

And Macs will get this in about 2 years, probably. We just got USB 3.0 in the latest generation of everything.

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Because Ivy Bridge was the first Intel chip with native USB 3.0 support in their Hub.


Some of the comments in this thread are hilarious. If this isn't planned until 2014 that means in the real world it's not coming until 2015 and Thunderbolt will be entrenched.

"Each Thunderbolt port offers dual 10Gbps channels and the ability to daisy-chain multiple Thunderbolt devices."

MikhailT said:

The costs will continue to drop down over time as more companies get onboard.

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Well Apple's cable was $49.99 in 2011, and it's still $49.99 now...

The USB consortium haven't managed it without the CPU spikes. There's a reason a lot of people keep saying there's a CPU usage issue when stress-loading the USB ports such as high-speed transfers or video streaming such as video cameras and so on. However, majority of people don't put a lot of USB devices at the same time on their computers, so it's not really a problem, that's why USB took over quickly.

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That is a problem I agree, but as drivers improve that'll be mitigated to some extent. FW devices can write directly to memory locations, bypassing the CPU altogether. I presume that's the same case with TB. USB has to go through the CPU first.

As almost always is the case, software is cheaper than hardware. Which is really the main reason USB is cheaper than TB, the protocol is handled almost entirely by the CPU. Trouble is, USB works well enough for most, and as with Betamax and VHS, the cheapest product unfortunately always seems to "win".