ASMedia Developing 10 GB/s USB 3.5 Controllers

According to company president Chewei Lin, ASMedia Technology is currently developing USB 3.5 host and device controller chips that will be available in 2014. These chips will offer speeds of up to 10 Gb/s at a much more affordable price than Intel’s Thunderbolt. Lin added that "USB 3.5 controller chips will have more opportunities in the market, especially for SSD applications."

Additionally, ASMedia’s 3rd Generation USB 3.0 to SATA ASM1153 chip has been officially verified by USB-IF. The company will begin delivering samples in Q3 2013 and will be manufactured by TSMC using an 85 nm process.

  • Temp_Username
    This is great news. I would hope it has backwards compatibility and they can deliver on speeds.
    Reply
  • unknown9122
    Good stuff. Thunderbolt is the future. But the flatness of the USB port allows for thinner PCs. The thunderbolt port has more vertical length.
    Reply
  • bison88
    Thunderbolt is hardly the future. It is no longer optical which makes it less different than USB. Not to mention Intel held back proper USB 3.0 support from the market intentionally for over 2 years in an effort to push Thunderbolt, their tech, as a "new" USB replacement that was unnecessary.
    Reply
  • fairfox
    10 GB/s ... 10 Gb/s......little more careful please !!!
    Reply
  • dgingeri
    Now if they can just make the UAS features standard on USB 3.5 and make it more efficient for storage, that would make it near equal to Thunderbolt. As it is, USB 3.0 only comes close to TB if UAS is used. USB 3.0 has too much baggage from 1.1 and 2.0 to be efficient enough for regular use.
    Reply
  • WithoutWeakness
    10956997 said:
    Good stuff. Thunderbolt is the future. But the flatness of the USB port allows for thinner PCs. The thunderbolt port has more vertical length.

    Thunderbolt is likely not the future. The concept of Thunderbolt (using external PCIe lanes) may be the future but Thunderbolt in its current iterations are certainly not. Thunderbolt hasn't become widely adopted because of the ubiquity of USB devices. If I buy an external hard drive I'm going to buy a USB 3.0 drive because I know I can plug it into any machine made in the last 15 years, even an old beige tower with USB 1.1 ports. Thunderbolt drives are only going to work on the newest and most expensive machines and offer minimal speed improvements over USB 3.0 for single drives. If a USB 3.5 solution can provide Thunderbolt-like speeds while still maintaining backwards compatibility with previous USB standards then it may be the better solution for users requiring faster external devices.
    Reply
  • Vorador2
    Thunderbolt is too pricey, both chipsets and cables. It has it's advantages, but most people can do with usb 3.0 nicely.

    TB only shines where very high speed is critical, like external graphic cards.
    Reply
  • josejones
    god damn it, I hate posting at Tom's now - every post I make says "an error has occurred"
    Reply
  • Grandmastersexsay
    I am trying to understand the point of this. What kind of device will be able to take advantage of such speeds? The fastest SSDs can only do slightly bettet than 500 MB/s or 4 Gb/s. We probably won't see those kind of speeds on comercially available storage medium for 5-10 years. I suppose this could be used for video, but display port's bandwidth is nearly double this already at over 17 Gb/s.
    Reply
  • edlivian
    its game over for thunderbolt. Stupid prices, complete lack of products, hardly any market share.
    Reply