Watch out Firewire. The USB 3.0 standard has been announced by Intel, and it will surpass USB 2.0’s 480 megabits per second data-transfer rate by a factor of 10. By embedding an optical signal path alongside traditional copper cabling, USB 3.0 will support somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.8 gigabits per second, while retaining backwards compatibility with the current standards. Not too shabby, and quite an upgrade over Firewire’s maximum of 800 megabits per second. There are also some steps being taken to fix the issues with USB’s traditional shared-bus architecture, which is one reason IEEE-1394 is often recommended for video work. While the official spec will be completed soon, expect to wait a few years before devices take advantage of the bandwidth upgrade. I imagine that commodity multiple-disk RAID enclosures will be some of the first to adopt the standard.

“Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech here at the Intel Developer Forum.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there’s typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. A prototype shown at the speech is working now, and USB 3.0 will have both optical and copper connections “from day one,” he added.”

I look forward to our new multi-Gbps unshared-bus overlords…