Intel, Hewlett-Packard Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments this week all agreed to form a promotional club for the next generation USB standard, a flash memory specification that will transfer data at 4.8 Gbps, on devices that hold up to 25 Gbytes.
The specification for the USB 3.0 standard should be out in the first half of 2008 with devices a year later. To put this in perspective this will mean that a 100 minute HD film will likely take 10 to 20 seconds to copy to a flash memory device, a move that may completely remove the issues surrounding the HD video formats HD DVD and Blu-ray. The new support group was announced at the Intel Developer Forum
The specification will be targeted at PCs and handsets and optimized for low power consumption, and backwards compatible with USB 2.0. No details of how the technology would work have been shared but we expect that it is the process of building parallel data paths onto the chips so that the flash is written in multiple blocks at once on multiple chips.