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Intel releases USB 3.0 host controller draft specs
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 14th August 2008
Intel has announced the availability of draft rev. 0.9 for USB 3.0 Host Controller Interface specs. An updated draft (rev. 0.95) is expected in the fourth quarter.
The company says that the xHCI specifications will be available royalty-free to all members of the USB 3.0 Promoter Group along with contributor companies that sign an xHCI contributor agreement.
Support for the new specification appears to cover all the major players, including AMD, Dell, Microsoft, NEC and Nvidia, which is great news following the rumbles we were hearing at Computex in June.
During the show, there were several sources close to the USB 3.0 Promoter Group that were complaining—on terms of anonymity, no less—about Intel's lack of openness on the new standard. The closest we got to an on-the-record comment was from Intel, who said that it was still working on finalising the specification before releasing it to anyone else.
The complaints seemed quite serious at the time and came from more than a just a couple of sources – everything seemed to be pointing towards two separate standards being created. Frankly, the split wouldn't have been a good thing for the industry, because we would've seen what happened with USB 1.0 all over again. This kind of thing screws customers over and adoption of the new standard would be cautious until the incompatibilities are worked out – come back when USB 3.1 is released would have been the best way to put it at the time had this happened.
Intel said it plans to release a revised xHCI specification (version 0.95) in the fourth quarter and will be again released royalty-free via an xHCI adopter's agreement. There's more, including quotes from various industry luminaries in the Intel statement released on its website – curiously though, there's no statement from Nvidia.
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Comments (14)Stats: 0.151 seconds
I know, it's been a long week, huh?
Is it being rationalised at v1? In other words, is it nearly here or is it likely to drag on like the 802.11n debacle?
I dunno, it looks like the forkers that didn't like what Intel was doing are no longer being forkers if you get me... so that means there should be a fairly unified approach by chipset/host controller manufacturers.
wary
:(
Hopefully taken in jest :)
Where companies push out a crappy product, just to make the "Edge" money.
I really rather wait longer, pay a little more, than have to completely lose my patience with a draft.
But with USB 3.0 I think they can wait a bit longer. It's not like people are dissatisfied with USB 2.0 yet.
But it's taking so long to ratify it. I'm assuming that any and all draft-n kit will be firmware upgradable to the full N-spec (if it ever changes)?
Draft-N kit is potentially very good, I think when I had a Belkin pre-N network setup at home, I was getting something like 260mbps over the air, which is quite impressive when you use it.
However, the Belkin N1 usb adapter caused major issues for me. For some reason, the mouse would stop responding, necessitating in unplugging and replugging the usb dongle for my Logitech G7 to get it working again (not an issue with the router, I might add, but what's the use of a wireless connection when you have no way of receiving it?) It worked a lot better after a couple of windows updates for the Belkin stick, but was never perfect. Meanwhile a Netgear WG111v2 stick (802.11g) works flawlessly.