If the naming gets clarified much more...
...I won't have an effing clue what's going on!
USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions
USB version 4 is on the way, offering double the fastest possible USB data transfer rate over the previous generation: a satisfying 40Gbps. On Monday, the USB Promoter Group announced the new spec is ready to be revealed, just a week after details of the latest iteration of the current standard – USB 3.2 – was released. Note …
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 06:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: LumpSpeed
Wasn't one of the disadvantages of Thunderbolt in the first place that it placed the line drivers in the cable plugs rather than the sockets? That makes sense from a technical point of view as the drivers can be matched to the length of the cable, but it puts the price up too.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 17:25 GMT JohnFen
Re: Please
"Dont change the physical interface from the current/USB-C formfactor."
But please do stop shoving all those incompatible signals through USB-C. As it is right now, we're back in the dark ages when cables that look identical on the outside can inserted into the wrong sockets and physically damage your devices. We're going to have to start labeling our cables and sockets again and remembering to double-check everything before plugging anything in.
It's insanity.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 06:35 GMT Phil Bennett
What about power delivery?
And alternate mode?
Those are the things that turn USB3 from a minor annoyance ("my device is running at 5Gbps instead of 10gbps - must be a slow port") to a game of what will work with this usbc port.
I've recently shopped for a laptop dock, and half of them use the Alternate Mode to support at least one of their displays. Does the port on my laptop support HDMI alternate mode? Displayport? Neither? Neither. Great.
I've also been shopping for a new power adapter for my Nintendo Switch, which uses USB-C (ish, apparently). All I need is USBC PD, right? Nope, there are 4 different voltages and god only knows how many power ratings.
So much for the Universal part of the name...
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 07:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: What about power delivery?
They need to only support USB-C with USB4, make the alternate modes mandatory, and only two power modes, low (regular old USB) and max (the full 100 watts) so there are only two types of ports and two types of cables.
They won't, of course, they will make it an even more confusing mess than USB3(.x) because they hate us.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:03 GMT Dr. Mouse
Re: What about power delivery?
"only two power modes, low (regular old USB) and max (the full 100 watts)"
But then, what about devices which need (say) 30W via USB? Does the mfr have to supply a more expensive 100W PSU?
Also, what happens when they up the spec and allow 300W? Yet another power mode is required (for backwards compatibility. And the older ones using the different power levels already, don't they need to maintain backwards compatibility with them?
This is always going to be the issue with backwards compatibility.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 18:13 GMT Dr. Mouse
Re: What about power delivery?
If the spec only allowed 2 power points, and the device only accepted USB PD as a charger/PSU, then the charger/PSU would have to be a 100W "max" charger. This would be more expensive to produce than one which would supply what the device actually needed (or close to it).
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 01:01 GMT cb7
Re: What about power delivery?
I recently found that HP don't stick to the Power Delivery spec for some of their recent laptops. So despite using a USB-C power connector, you can't just plug in a USB-C charger from say a Lenovo laptop and expect it to work.
So much for a "Universal" standard as you say.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 11:26 GMT Is It Me
Re: C'mon USB consort.
USB 2 support is baked in to Windows 7, USB 3 isn't.
This means on a computer with USB 3 only you can't install vanilla Windows 7, you have to preload the drivers.
It should be a self resolving issue with the end of Win7 support, but I can't see it going for a while.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 17:22 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: C'mon USB consort.
"This means on a computer with USB 3 only you can't install vanilla Windows 7, you have to preload the drivers."
Of course you can. You just have to set the VM settings to *say* that the virtual hardware is only USB2.
Oh wait ... you're not installing Windows on the bare metal, are you?
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 07:18 GMT gypsythief
Use Case?
I can see external hard drives being one, if anyone still uses those (well, apart from Mac users without up-gradable internal storage), but for anyone else? My mouse transfers a few KB/s, my keyboard something similar. USB 2 actually suffices really well for the vast majority of [at least my] use cases.
In the meantime, I'm stuck shuftying files around my network at 1Gb/s. Plz can we haz 10Gb/s network kit at affordable prices, rather than faffing about with ever faster-faster-faster USB?
(Icon --> my over-loaded switch going nuclear)
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 08:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Use Case?
It includes any data transfer - if you're using an 8K camera and have to download the footage an high speed connection is nice. It also includes what was DisplayPort - aka display connections.
Ethernet 10G is slowly becoming more affordable, bus since most consumer/SOHO installation were moved to WiFi there's less demand for lower end 10G devices, and that reflects on prices. Moreover, not many lower end devices would really take advantage of it.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 08:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Use Case?
Best use case I have seen for Thunderbolt and so USB4 is:
High Spec Laptop
Thunderbolt passthrough external GPU enclosure
Thunderbolt hub with mouse, external display, keyboard etc.
You sit down with your high spec laptop (something with a beefy CPU), plug in ONE thunderbolt and suddenly you have all your peripherals, a 4k display and a beefy GPU to play games/video edit on. All from one plug, not multiple of the same, just one tiny thunderbolt.
It is pretty impressive.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 09:35 GMT TwistedPsycho
Re: Use Case?
Why stop at a high spec laptop?
Have a mid spec i5 laptop or 2-in-1 that is light-weight for working on the road and an Intel Serial Bus 4 connected beast unit with a second processor that can co-operate.
From a business use case, you then could have a ratio of beast units to standard units that staff can simply dock into place and it automatically uprates the work that you are trying to do.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 10:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Use Case?
Sure, why not indeed.
I was going along the personal use gaming PC use case really, and this use case gets around the issues with cooling (internal GPU is not used) and upgradability but also leaves you portable with a decent machine.
It is cool tech, but I'll stick with a tower because I'm a caveman.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 08:46 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: Use Case?
I have an ASI178MM planetary camera with 6 Mpixel, 12 bits/pixel grey scale running 60 FPS uncompressed and pumping the data to a Samsung T5 500 GB extern SSD at 400-450 MB/s, grabbing some 250 GB of lunar data in under 20 minutes. I would love to have the ASI183MM (20-odd Mpixel) running at the same frame rate. I would capture more quickly, and need far fewer panes for full-resolution lunar mosaics. Perhaps a niche, but there must be more use cases
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 09:29 GMT Andy The Hat
Re: Use Case?
Quicker? Using what data store to keep up with it? It's not likely that most astro photographers would consider putting a high bandwidth raid stack next to their imaging laptop to dump their images onto, with dew potentially running down the front of the case ... If you have a warm room, the "USB3.4.5.6 type 3 - HyperX" transmission distance will probably be too short so you then start to think about remote dumping across a 10Gb network but you'll have to use bandwidth aggregation on multiple channels to match the sooper-whatsit-USB throughput ... And, even if you could do that for less than stupid-cost, damn win10 would still insist on updating in the middle of the session ...
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 10:24 GMT devTrail
Re: Use Case?
I agree that in many cases you don't need a fast USB, but:
- Linux Virtual machine on an external encrypted drive.
- Transfer data with PCs not connected to the network for security reason.
- When the training data has to be preprocessed several times in different way to run different versions of an experiment and you don't want to clutter the local drive you might be tempted to train your software keeping the data on the external drive, but it might take ages.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 08:51 GMT Hans 1
since Intel's people are in the driving seat, sanity should prevail
Intel are naming i3's i5's or i7's, yes, yes ... I had already seen i5^H3's in laptops and recently, already commented about it, found an i7^H3.
Intel has been taken over by the marketing monks, every single one of these claims to have created a Jobsian reality distortion field when all they are waving is a $0.02 ferromagnetic wand.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 10:26 GMT TRT
Re: USB colour coding
Well, it will be the one connector to do all things, royalty free and open standards. Which won't suit Apple at all. They'll have to whip out some version of it... maybe with a physically incompatible magnetic latching connector that'll cost 23 cents each to license.
And as for naming conventions...
Thunderbolt - Lightning - Very Very Frightening.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 10:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
What a shit idea.
One of the main benefits of USB over Firewire (then) and Thunderbolt (now) for me always was that USB never allowed direct DMA bus access to outside devices. Yes, you can mitigate that with host side IOMMU, but that is still dodgy, as it may or may not already be activated during the boot process. I can only hope that they will not do 1:1 cloning of the specifications.
If they do it will be a serious rollback of a higer security standard.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:04 GMT Charles 9
Who cares about security if we can't make the F'n deadline? When it comes between doing it fast and doing it right, fast wins every time because you can BS around a wrong answer but not a missed deadline.
Otherwise, show me a high-speed, low-latency device interconnect that doesn't use DMA of some sort. My back-of-envelope physics calculations tell me you can't; the speed of light gets in the way.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 19:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
No security does matter ! - if the port security is hackable, then we can’t rely on it
So would have to avoid the interface - or would have to try to sanatize it in some way.
We are at a point now where we really should be trying to get things right.
Untrustworthy links are unacceptable.
(Yes I know that all current links are presently untrustworthy to some extent)
We really do need to do better - especially with data volumes growing.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 10:35 GMT tatatata
What did they say?
But what does it all mean? I thought my command of the English language was sufficient, but I just do not understand what "The primary goal of USB is to deliver the best user experience combining data, display and power delivery over a user-friendly and robust cable and connector solution," actually means. Or "we’re opening the doors for innovation across a wide range of devices and increasing compatibility to deliver better experiences to consumers," Is there anyone that can distill any information from that sentence?
When I see statements like that, I think they used one of the many mission statement generators that you can find on the Internet. I can make press releases like that too:
It is USB4's mission to disseminate interdependent technology. It is committed to synergistically fashion infrastructures. It is engineered to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace. It is for integration in mission critical services to meet the increasing needs of the users.
(users? shouldn't that be utilizationers?)
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 11:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
"This follows from Intel's promise to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty free"
HIstorical note: I seem to recall hearing that way back the future was going to be the high speed firewire connections .... however, while of the "patent pool" members wnated a royalty of something like 50c per device using the interface one of them (Apple) were insistent on something like $2 per port. Result was that people decided firewire was not going to be cost effective on anything other than high end and they picked up a thing called USB that Intel had but until then had been considered to be too slow as the cheap'n'cheerful option to go with
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:15 GMT SimonC
Someone tell me why we need 40gbps
If only they made USB-C a single cable type, with a reversible connector, where *every single cable* must fully support *every single function* so we can live in a world where we can plug anything into anything, charge up anything with anything else from any cable in any system. Slap the USB4 spec on top of it.
I have a battery pack for a camera light that says warning: only use usb chargers rated 2 amps or more (had to fish around for ageees before I found one).
If you have to hunt for the right charger, and the right cable, it's NOT UNIVERSAL. Call it SB4 instead.
Mine's the coat with the 6 usb cables, one's too short, one's too long, one's the wrong usb type, one only works when you wiggle it, one only does charging, and one of them is the messiah that charges and connects anything but frequently goes missing while I await its return.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:53 GMT JohnFen
USB has lost the plot
The Big Problem that USB solved was that it made connecting an managing peripherals much easier and less error-prone that it had been with the legacy serial port. However, beginning with USB 3, that advantage seems to have been eliminated.
USB4 promises to make that even worse, particularly since it will use USB-C, which makes the complexity problem worse than ever all by itself.
We'll see, though. Maybe they're work this out in the end. In the meantime, I'm going to stick with USB2. If I need high speed data transfer, I'm not using USB anyway, so 2 is just fine.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 14:23 GMT Kez
All I ask
Is for universal USB-C compatibility. Time was, you could plug a cable with a shaped plug into a port with a matching shape, and could reasonably expect some level of communication between the devices at either end (driver or software problems notwithstanding). With USB-C, you have ports and devices that natively support USB 3.0, USB 3.1, USB 2.0 Thunderbolt 3, charging, DisplayPort, HDMI, Ethernet, even PCI-E - the host device may support all of the above OR NONE AT ALL, and the only way to check is by looking up compatibility against a spec sheet. Try getting a non-technical person to understand that... It's even more confusing than the M.2. PCI-E / SATA debacle.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
