10Gbps USB 3.1 was being shown off at CES along side USB-PD silicon, both up and running. Neither are technically final silicon, but the FPGAs shown were running the real deal protocols.
You might recall USB-PD, the spec that lets you push up to 100W across a USB cable. Sure they showed it off last year, but this is the final solution, and like the last time it was charging a laptop while pushing a Displaylink based HD video stream. The board itself was pretty small, a bit larger than a business card with a similar chip inside the laptop. Both worked fine, unplugging the cable stopped the laptop from charging and the video from playing and it was not buggy at all.
The laptop is charging across the video cable
As you can see from the demo done by the USB-IF’s top hand model Jeff, the single dock/hub device charged both the laptop and redistributed the video signal. It was running on a Spartan 6 FPGA at the moment so the promise of late 2013 USB-PD silicon is running a bit behind but it won’t be long now. With the next refresh of devices around Computex, I would expect to see PD silicon as an option here and there.
The numbers are twice what they should be
The other demo was a bit less interesting to see, there was a desktop with another FPGA on a PCIe board that had USB 3.1 aka 10Gbps USB up and running. The demo was pretty simple, it was a disk throughput benchmark and the rig was pushing a bit over 1GBps read rates, not bad for an open standard. Expect USB3.1 to be a bit farther out but it is definitely coming sooner than many expect. From there, well all we will say is the spec allows for up to 25Gbps….S|A
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Charlie Demerjian
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