During the last few weeks, many manufacturers have started to announce their USB 3.0 solutions. These are mother card manufacturers who start to offer some on their top-of-the-range products and some other of the manufacturers of storage solutions who want to be seen on the market as soon as possible.
The acceptance of this standard may however only become a reality as from 2011. According to EETimes, Intel does not expect to add this protocol in its controllers next year next but only one year later. And in the world of the standards, it is Intel who decides what happens. As long as its controllers will not support natively USB 3.0, it will not have a mass market. Manufacturers will be able to add additional controllers on their mother cards, but this will have a cost thus they will only affect the top-of-the-range machines, that is to say a niche market. There is also some truth that the implementation of USB 3.0 using an additional chip is far from being the panacea. This chip is found connected to the machine by a PCI-Express link 2.0 1x and this limits the data flow to 250 MB/s, that is to say half of theoretical output of this interface. This is not a major problem, but indeed it is a limitation.
We do not know why Intel decided to push back by one year the addition of USB 3.0 to its products. Maybe they seek to push the Peak Light forward.
The weight of Intel is so great that any standard they choose will become a de facto standard a few months later.
