ASMedia Developing 10 GB/s USB 3.5 Controllers

[RedundantInk]

ASMedia’s USB 3.5 controller chips will arrive in 2014 and offer speeds of up to 10 Gb/s.

ASMedia Developing 10 GB/s USB 3.5 Controllers : Read more

 

[Temp_Username]

This is great news. I would hope it has backwards compatibility and they can deliver on speeds.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[fairfox]

10 GB/s ... 10 Gb/s......little more careful please !!!

 

[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.

 

[WithoutWeakness]

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.

 

[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.

 

[josejones]

god damn it, I hate posting at Tom's now - every post I make says "an error has occurred"

 

[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.

 

[edlivian]

its game over for thunderbolt. Stupid prices, complete lack of products, hardly any market share.

 

[jn77]

Thunderbolt will go like firewire, the problem is in real world bandwidth tests fireware always came close to spec where USB never even met spec, what ever the max spec has been. I would like to see a firewire 256,000 instead of firewire 1600.

 

[danwat1234]

So will it be called USB3.5 or USB 3B?

 

[velocityg4]

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.

Although the widespread use of USB is part of the equation. The bigger problem is that Thunderbolt cables and compatible products are so darn expensive. It seems to add $100 onto the USB counterpart for any peripheral. External docks and PCI-e enclosures costing more than really high end gaming motherboards. Small RAID enclosures running $700 or a whole lot more. Then add $50 a cable. It has priced itself out of the running.

One of the most ridiculous points is the expensive cable needing chips at each end. They need to refine the technology so that regular chip free cables work.

 

[Soda-88]

1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5

Makes sense...

 

[d3seeker]

I certainly hope this improves the real world speeds seen by such devices

 

[danwat1234]

I certainly hope this improves the real world speeds seen by such devices

It won't help mechanical drives connected to USB3.5 because the mechanical drive itself it the bottleneck at something less than 200MB/s. SSDs on the other hand, sure. Hybrid drives may eventually be able to take advantage of it too