Super-fast USB 3.0 technology may begin to supersede USB 2.0 in 2009. Drawing on technology developed by HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP, Texas Instruments, and Intel, a USB 3.0 Promoter Group hopes to deliver by mid-2008 a proposed specification for USB ten times faster than today's technology. The Promoter Group was spearheaded by Intel, in cooperation with the USB Implementer's Forum.
The main two goals of SuperSpeed USB are to provide a 10X boost in transfer rate (from 480-Mbits/s in USB 2.0 to 4.8 Gbits/s in USB 3.0), while dramatically lowering power consumption.
The upgrade should allow for high-def devices, such as HD DVD or Blu-ray players, to use the standard to send data. As of now, today's USB cables aren't fast enough for such heavy transfers, sending data at 480 megabits per second. USB 3.0, on the other hand, will increase that tenfold to a whopping 4.8 gigabits per second.
One example of their speed goals is to transfer a 18GB HD movie to a portable device in 47 seconds. The same thing would take 10 minutes or more with HighSpeed USB 2.0. In addition, USB 3.0 will offer greater energy efficiency.
It will be backward compatible, so current USB 2.0 devices will be able to plug into USB 3.0 ports: the SuperSpeed devices will use the same connectors and the same programming and device models as existing devices.
