Universal Serial Bus 1.1, the de facto external connectivity standard for Mac and PC, has picked up the speed after its slow adoption by peripheral manufacturers, users and PC OEMs. At present, numerous USB devices are out on the market but they seem to lack one thing: the speed. USB 2.0 is the answer to this.

What is USB 2.0?
Drafted by Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, NEC and Philips, USB Specification version 2.0 will increase device data throughout up to 480Mbps, 40 times faster than USB 1.1 devices. Originally, the new USB 2.0 was only intended to go as fast as 240Mbps but with the team’s engineering effort, the speed was raised to 480Mbps.

With the increased speed, computer consumers will benefit with an additional range of high performance peripherals. Even with multiple high-speed peripherals connected to a USB 2 bus, they will not have to worry about hitting the bandwidth bottleneck. The new specification also inherits the current USB’s Plug and Play and hot-swapping capability as well as providing backward compatibility for USB 1.1 hardware.

Next: Impact on users

Talk back

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Jim Regan, reganjj@sce.com

April 28, 2000

I'm not optimistic that all the various USB2 components will come together until late 2001
I recall it took about 3 years from announcement time of USB1 until I could get all the required components (O/S, motherboard, BIOS, cable adaapter, and USB keyboard to even try USB. I'm not optimistic that all the various USB2 components will come together until late 2001 or early 2002 - even given that USB1 is in place. What chipset(s) implement USB2 at 480 Mbps in the typical consumer PC? What clock-generator chip will provide the 480 MHz USB data clock? What 8-bit (or 16-bit) microcontrollers are ready to support USB2 at 480 Mbps? Who will be the first to deliver USB2 enabled PCs to the general consumer market?

Jim's right, but wrong
USB did take a while to catch on, but that was because it was brand new. This new version of USB shouldn't take that long because most devices won't even need it. Do you really need a keyboard that has throughput up near half a gigabit per second? So for the most part, he's right: most of the devices won't even support it for at least a year, but in this case... most don't HAVE to.

I'm looking forward to trying out a network of three or four computers exclusively with USB 2. I'm hoping this won't take long, but since it's never been really done before (12Mbps is kinda slow compared to 100Mbps), it could be a while...

Firewire and USB, will it ever be bootable?
I have come to like the ease of use with USB. I know have a mouse, keyboard, camera, scanner and printer that are USB. With the transfer rate of USB finally starting to rival hard drive standards... when will it, or 1394, have bootable drives for PC??? It would be nice to have a zip or LS-120 for one of those "rare" times when I need an emergency boot. Without having to use another IRQ to boot IDE or SCSI, or even (yuck) floppy. Would it really be that hard to add a bios to them, letting you select your boot drive like the bios of a SCSI card?