No additional chips needed... next year.
Intel may seem to be a bit behind the game when it comes to integrating USB 3.0 into it chipsets, but that will finally be a solved problem next year with Ivy Bridge.
Kirk Skaugen, a vice president at the Intel Architecture Group, told attendees of a developer conference in Beijing that the Ivy Bridge platform will have both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt (formerly known as Light Peak).
"Intel is going to support USB 3.0 in the 2012 client platform. We're going to support Thunderbolt capability. We believe they're complementary," he said, according to Cnet.
For a while, some thought that Intel was favoring its Thunderbolt over USB 3.0. Given that much of the industry isn't ready to drop that familiar USB connector just yet, Intel will be supporting both in its next platform.
"We encourage all of you working on peripherals around the PC to engage on both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt," Skaugen said.
AMD will actually beat Intel to the punch in offering built-in USB 3.0 support. AMD yesterday said that it will be including Superspeed support in its Fusion A75 and A70M chipsets.
Yeah, it took a while for 1.1 & 2.0 to get implemented, but those were substantial upgrades in an uncertain market. The market demand for 480MB/s is clear, and the standard hasn't changed that much that a bunch of engineers can't solve the differences.
USB 3.0 should be great once it goes mainstream, however i doubt the normal user cares or knows the difference
Anyway, this is welcome news.
It's over 25 years old!
...wait...
Will these systems be too fast? I mean c'mon, with all the fast-sounding names, they've gotta be too fast for us. lol
Sound like a crime-fighting duo
That does make me wonder if we'll have bottlenecks like we had with the 1156/155 sockets. Granted most of the new stuff will likely be moved over to chipset and avoid using PCI-E lanes, but how much bandwidth will you have for these devices?
Eh, who knows.
Battlefield 3!
2011 for four channels of DDR3 if that's what you want
maybe intel will release 2012 slot year 2012 ;-)
because ivy bridge is 50% faster then sandy bridge right.......