Intel Announces Beefy Bandwidth Boost for USB 3.0

By Greg McNevin

August 18, 2008: Intel has heralded the arrival of its “Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB,” enabling manufacturers to begin designing and rolling out USB 3.0 hardware.

A while coming, USB 3.0 will offer transfer speeds of 600 MB/s, roughly ten times what USB 2.0 currently offers, while retaining interoperability.

Intel says that its xHCI draft specification supports compatibility among various implementations of USB devices, and claims it will make it easier to develop software support for the industry.

In a good omen for the future of the technology, Intel has also managed to garner the support of long-time rival AMD.

“The future of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth intensive,” said Phil Eisler, AMD corporate vice president and general manager of the Chipset Business Unit. “Lifestyles filled with HD media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform.

“AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification.”

Intel says it plans to make a revised xHCI 0.95 specification available in Q4 this year.

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