AMD's Fusion Chipsets to Support USB 3.0
AMD has said that upcoming chipsets will feature support for USB 3.0, otherwise known as SuperSpeed USB.
USB 3.0 has been seen on motherboards for quite a while now, but USB-IF this week announced that the A75 and A70M Fusion chipsets from Advanced Micro Devices will be the first certified 'Superspeed USB' chipsets. USB 3.0 offers transfer rates of up to 5Gbps, quite an upgrade from the speeds offered by the ten-year-old USB 2.0.
“The integration of SuperSpeed USB into AMD’s Fusion Controller Hubs demonstrates AMD’s commitment to providing the industry’s latest, most innovative connectivity technologies,” said Chris Cloran, AMD Corporate Vice-President and General Manager, Client Group. “AMD Fusion Controller Hubs will provide competitive performance while consuming low power with active USB 3.0 traffic for high definition video and fast connectivity with the latest SuperSpeed USB devices.”
The announcement makes AMD the first company to integrate a USB 3.0 controller into its silicon. Rival Intel has yet to take the same step of integrating USB 3.0 into its own chipsets and, according to The Register, doesn’t have plans to do so until 2012. This almost definitely has something to do with Intel’s new baby, the Thunderbolt standard (previously known as Light Peak). Thunderbolt was unveiled at the same time as the new MacBook Pros, which support the interface, and though Intel has said it can exist alongside USB 3.0, the company definitely seems to have a favorite at the moment.
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Wait a second, doesn't the 800 series of SB's already support that?
No, they have USB 3 support through the NEC controller.
wow, yay....
There's a reason why usb 2.0 has been around for forever: It's enough.
Is there a reason for 3.0, besides running 5 or more studio quality cameras for your own personal TV station in your basement?
I dunno about you, but transferring with 30mb/s on my external hard drive isn't enough when I'm copying over 100gb of data....
wow, yay....There's a reason why usb 2.0 has been around for forever: It's enough.Is there a reason for 3.0, besides running 5 or more studio quality cameras for your own personal TV station in your basement?
Since when was 10x faster speed not "good enough"? The only reason USB 3 hasn't been widely adopted yet it is relatively new and USB 2's ubiquity is unchallenged so far. If everyone thought like you, we would still be at 640KB of memory for our DOS systems.
That 30 meg a sec is prolly just your hard drive/controller or something else cause 2.0 does twice that.
Wait a second, doesn't the 800 series of SB's already support that?
I think it's not integrated. You get that from MB manufacturers.
wow, yay....There's a reason why usb 2.0 has been around for forever: It's enough.Is there a reason for 3.0, besides running 5 or more studio quality cameras for your own personal TV station in your basement?
????????USB 2.0 bottlenecks external drives pretty bad (even my 500gb 5400rpm USB drive, and I cringe when I'm in a situation where I can't use eSata to connect my 7200rpm drive). So yes, there is a reason for USB 3.0
wow, yay....There's a reason why usb 2.0 has been around for forever: It's enough.Is there a reason for 3.0, besides running 5 or more studio quality cameras for your own personal TV station in your basement?
Everybody should cut this guy some slack... It took him a long time to dial-up and get on-line to write that comment.
Thunderbolt is prob going go the way of Firewire. Most of your avg pc users are more concernd about comtability over anything else, which is why USB is not going to get knocked off its thrown for a long time. USB has been out now for a little over a decade with millions upon millions of products that support USB and becuse of that. It has become apart of the everyday pc users lives and one of the the reason why it's still around and Firewire is all but dead is because of its wide range of compatibilty over the years.
I'm more concerned for dual channel memory support. That small change would further widen the massive performance gap between the fusion and atom platforms.
There's a reason why usb 2.0 has been around for forever: It's enough.
If I remember correctly, USB 2.0 wasn't adopted very quickly either over the 1.1 standard. Even 1.1 stuck around for many years afterwards.
That 30 meg a sec is prolly just your hard drive/controller or something else cause 2.0 does twice that.
That's the theoretical peak of the interface. Your actual speeds will be far lower. Even with enhanced drivers designed for specific products, USB 2.0 can't put out more than 40MB/s.
Plug any mechanical external drive into a USB 2.0 port and benchmark it, you'll see. Most mechanical drives easily exceed 100MB/s these days, so the extra overhead of USB 3.0 is very much welcomed.
wow, yay....There's a reason why usb 2.0 has been around for forever: It's enough.Is there a reason for 3.0, besides running 5 or more studio quality cameras for your own personal TV station in your basement?
That 30 meg a sec is prolly just your hard drive/controller or something else cause 2.0 does twice that.
Nope, back to the drawing board!
USB 3.0 is a welcome addition, its the next evolution in the USB standard. What I really wanted was "Lightpeak" to support full HD video displays, basically I want my system to be in my computer room but be able to display to the living rooms HD display. If they can combine this with a USB channel (keyboard / mouse) and audio channels, then it would revolutionize how home computing is done.
But it looks like Intel is trying to replace the open USB standard with their propriety Intel-only LP standard and not even bothering with the remote display capability.
What's so good about integrated USB 3.0 controller over a a NEC controller?
(forgive any inconsistencies in my question, altough I believe it's understandable)
SATA III (6 Gb/s) has made an apeparance. PCI-e 3.0 will start appearing later this year. USB 3.0 is coming too. Seems to me technology is moving forward but not as fast as gamers and enthusiasts would like.
Fantastic news, hopefully this means that Bulldozer will also support USB 3 natively. I can't see AMD supporting USB3 for their laptop systems but not there high end PCs.
Cost for one, simplicity of design for another. MB manufacturers having to add another chip to a board raise's the cost of the design. Low power devices have a requirement to be cheap and small, add on chips conflict with this requirement.
Just look back in the days with IDE controllers and IO controllers were "add in" cards and the issues those caused.
So what The Register is saying is...Ivy Bridge won't be coming around until next year. Crap!
No, they have USB 3 support through the NEC controller.
What's an NEC controller?
What's an NEC controller?
Currently all motherboards that have support for USB 3.0 are using a controller chip manufactured by NEC, and fused to the motherboard. The motherboard chipset doesn't have any native support, so this is the only form of USB 3.0 for now.
NEC is making a fortune I'm sure.
What's so good about integrated USB 3.0 controller over a a NEC controller?
(forgive any inconsistencies in my question, altough I believe it's understandable)
For one, it would reduce data latency slightly. It would also be cheaper since it would be integrated within the system's chipset rather than buying a chip from a 3rd party. Having the USB 3.0 option right now usually increases the board cost by at least another $15~$20.
Yay! Cheaper (USB3)AMD mobos for everyone!
USB 3.0 has been needed for a long time.
Thunderbolt / Light Peak will do some pretty neat things... but we'll see how it goes.
I have yet to see USB HDD that can bottleneck USB 2.0 link. Most HDDs I have do something like 25-35 megabytes per second, while USB 2.0 could handle up to 60.
USB 2 cannot do 60 MB/s the maximum speed for USB 2 is 480 Mb/s which when turned into bytes per second taking account of overhead of the protocol gives you just over 30 Mega Bytes a second.
I have yet to see USB HDD that can bottleneck USB 2.0 link. Most HDDs I have do something like 25-35 megabytes per second, while USB 2.0 could handle up to 60.
Your HDD's would probably perform 5-15% better on Firewire 400mbps which is 80mbps slower than USB2. You need USB3,1 reason is that it makes you think you have slow external hard drives.
I have yet to see USB HDD that can bottleneck USB 2.0 link. Most HDDs I have do something like 25-35 megabytes per second, while USB 2.0 could handle up to 60.
I can definitively tell you that an external had drive on eSata will move data around 5x faster than the same drive on a USB 2.0 connection.
I have yet to see USB HDD that can bottleneck USB 2.0 link. Most HDDs I have do something like 25-35 megabytes per second, while USB 2.0 could handle up to 60.
Just how old are your hdd's? Any decent drive from the last 5 years can max out usb2.I'd love to see where you usb2 defenders are getting your info from.
I have yet to see USB HDD that can bottleneck USB 2.0 link. Most HDDs I have do something like 25-35 megabytes per second, while USB 2.0 could handle up to 60.
My external HDDs transfer around 30MB when connected to USB, when I connect the drive inside my system (SATA) it more then doubles transfer speed, kind of shows that USB is slowing down the transfer rate.
I do not get why people are defending usb2. It is not like usb3 cannot support usb2 or earlier devices
I'm not a fan of USB2. I find USB2 slow even when it was introduced. That is why I had no objection to upgrade my system with eSATA when it became available. USB2 is only good for mouse and keyboards, well maybe some slow USB sticks also. So I'm really looking forward for USB3 support in the latest hardwares.
Just how old are your hdd's? Any decent drive from the last 5 years can max out usb2.I'd love to see where you usb2 defenders are getting your info from.
No they can't max out USB 2.0 because the 480 mbits/s maximum bandwidth is basically just theoretical. Usually it operates around 240 mbits/s. A hdd when connected through firewire 400 can transfer data way faster that usb 2.0, even though firewire has a maximum bandwidth 80 mbits/s lower than usb 2.0