At 1.2GB/sec, USB 3.1 could spell doom for Intel’s Thunderbolt

Speed seems to be getting faster every year when it comes to computing. New technology is hitting incredible speeds at affordable prices, something that Intel doesn’t want to hear.

At CES this January, Jeff Ravencraft, the president and chief operating officer of the USB Implementers Forum USB-IF), told The Reg that the unfortunately named “SuperSpeed” USB 3.0 would double its throughput from 5Gb/sec to 10Gb/sec in its 3.1 incarnation. We recently sat down with him again and saw it in action.

The demo was conducted using a Fresco Logic–developed, FPGA-based, USB 3.1 prototype controller board connected not to a storage device, but to DDR memory. Why not an SSD? “Because there are no solid-state drives that are at that level yet,” Ravencraft explained.