inportb

Recently, revision 0.9 of the Extensible Host Controller Interface was announced in support of the USB 3.0 architecture. USB 3.0, also known as Super-Speed USB, will be 10 times as fast as USB 2.0 (High-Speed) due to the addition of a fiber-optic cable. Various groups, including AMD, Dell, NEC, and Microsoft, support a common xHCI specification and are likely to adopt Intel’s standard.

The draft specification is available under a royalty-free license in accordance with an xHCI contributor agreement. This should help promote the success of the new standard, and we should be seeing USB 3.0 devices within a year or two.

Intel’s press release is available here.