News USB-IF courts controversy with USB 3.2 naming plan

Ummm..

Also, USB naming convention throws me for a loop every time I have to explain it. Or think about it. Type A, C, Z, Jabberwocky.. Kopf ist kaputt.

 

Just when you think they couldn't make more of a mess of their naming conventions... Oh dear me.

 

Maybe they have an aversion to the numbers 4 & 5.

 

"USB 3.0 USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.2 Gen 1 are the same thing!" is a popular meme, but not actually true beyond data transfer rate.
The reason for USB 3.2 subsuming 'older' standards to to keep all the parts of the USB protocol other than data transfer speed up to date and in lock-step. After all, you want to be able to connect both high-bandwidth storage arrays and low-bandwidth wireless mouse dongles to the same port. Without keeping all bandwidth levels on the same standard, you end up with either:
- New devices released on older standards, so all host devices need to be able to deal with decades of legacy standards and switch between therm depending on device attached (an obvious headache with hubs and chaining involved). See the *********** of USB PD that happened when "oh, but legacy devices want to do X, Y or sometimes Z! (even though Y and Z are wildly out of spec)" gets kowtowed to.
- Low-bandwidth devices need to support the full 20gb/s transfer rate even when it is massive overkill and a huge cost inflation
- A new standard that incorporates multiple bandwidth levels within the same standard.
Option 3 is the one the USB IF have gone for, and the one they should have gone for for USB PD in the first place.

 

You have to do this anyway and manufacturers are always going to use old well known, easily accessible, cheap to implement USB specs if they don't need anything better. So USB 2.0 is probably going to be around for many years(decades?) more due to mice not needing anything else.

Also new client devices need to connect to old hosts in a compatible manner(my server at home has on board USB 2.0 throughout, my USB 3 thumb drives have to cope with that.)

I don't get this, surely to cost of the controller is the major factor in implementing any standard?

This is what I don't get surely part of the speed limits is the quality of the cable used and the electronics in the controller probably already have to check for this right? (or do they just dumbly decide on what the highest standard is that each device supports and then tries to use my 2.0 Type-B to A like a 3.0 cable?

 

That's the point of having multiple bandwidths in the same standard: you can implement a cheap USB 3.2 controller that only needs to hand off a few kilobytes now and again, or a beefy USB 3.2 controller that can shunt tens of gigabits about. If you relegate lower bandwidth devices to "just use USB 2.0" you're now designing for a nearly two decade old standard and don't get the benefit of later developments (e.g. Type C).

 

So you'll have USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.2 Gen 1 all referring to the same speed/standard depending on the age of the device...

And then you have 'is this Type-C or Type C with Power Delivery?'


And no doubt in a couple years time we'll have USB π Gen 3⅞

 

Super USB 3.2 Turbo

 

Only acceptable if it comes with a red Turbo button

 

But unless the 3.2 LB spec is cheaper to design and implement in silicon than 2.0 it'll never be used for these use cases.

Type-C can be implemented on USB 2.0. My phone, and a hell of a lot of other phones, use exactly that as their charging and data port.

 

No, you phone implements USB 3.1 using the High Sped data rate (rather than SuperSpeed).

Which demonstrates my point: 'just keep the sold stuff and add the new bits we want to it' is exactly what the USB IF is doing, but they're not using the same name (USB 2.0) to refer to two completely different standards.

 

Most backward compatible standards do that, if USB3 was completely new standard with no backward compatibility we would have the same situation as with Thunderbolt - very few manufacturers would bother to implement it, because vast majority of users/devices don't really need it.

 

USB 3.2 isn't even out yet and...