By Charlie Demerjian
09 May 2008 - 4:07 PM

THERE IS ANOTHER power game brewing over USB3.0 and it looks like the user is going to pay the price once again. If you remember the OHCI/UHCI mess that made USB1.0 worthless, Intel is about to provoke the same thing for USB3.0. It is power games, user be *******. The problem this time is that USB3.0 is basically an Intel spec, think PCIe2.0 over external cable and you are 98 per cent of the way there.

Intel is the driving force here, and it did the bulk of the work, so fair enough. If you are making the usual widgets for it, memory sticks, rocket launchers and sex toys, you can get the specs now. If you are competing with Intel, that is, you are making a chipset or anything with a CPU in it, you have to wait six months. Don't take this to just mean x86 either, ARM, MIPS or PPC and device vendors get equally shafted.

This behaviour is not what defines 'standard', it is what defines 'proprietary'. Basically if you are competing with Intel, or are perceived to be competing with it, you have to wait and suck down a six-month disadvantage. The last time this happened was USB1.0. Intel played the same games and the standard was so broken it never worked. What happened then is that the world went around Intel and developed their own spec, and you ended up with UHCI or OHCI, neither of which were compatible.

Things sucked, nothing worked, and the 'standard' stagnated from 1995 to 1998. USB1.1 fixed that problem by basically throwing it out and starting over, and USB2.0 was done as a real standard from the beginning. Shockingly it worked, confusing Hi-Speed/Fast/Chocolate-covered/Swift-ish labeling aside. Now back to USB3.0 and Intel is pulling the same dumb tricks again.