USB 3.0 appeared last year, but the lack of units that supported the new standard made it a slow launch, besides the number of supported motherboards. In 2011 that standard is expected to take off and before the end of the year it is expected that 80 million USB 3.0 units will have shipped, a number that is hardly impressive when looking at the entire USB market.
USB has been around for long and is the standard for most accessories that connects to a PC. USB 2.0 offers 480 Mbit/s, a number that was sufficient once, but lately has become a problem with the growing USB memories and external harddrives. USB 3.0 comes with substantially higher bandwidth at 4800 Mbit/s, but the new standard hasn’t managed to claim the ground it was expected to.
USB 3.0 ships with nearly all motherboards today, either 2 or 4 ports, and AMD’s new Sabine/Lynx platforms for Llano both have integrated USB 3.0. Intel will follow with integrated USB 3.0 with Ivy Bridge next year so the support is there and should be noticed in 2011 as In-Stat estimates that 80 million units will ship this year.
On the whole 80 million is not a large number when 3.5 billion USB units shipped in 2010, but an empowering factor will be the support for mobile phones. They are expected to bring USB 3.0 support in 2013 and then the new standard is expected to really take off and replace USB 2.0.
Source: XbitLabs
