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USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

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Re: USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Names are fine, the problem is if you call something superspeed what are you going to call next years speed? Hyper speed? Ultraspeed? Turbospeed? You rather quickly run out, and that’s if it doesn’t start sounding ridiculously hyperbolic before that. And of course superspeed is super slow by todays standards. So you have to either use marketing names that don’t mean anything by themselves, or numbers that naturally i…

That's the mistake that USB 2.0 made calling 480 Mbps "High Speed". Now it seems incredibly slow by today's standards.

Or even USB 1.1, which called the faster of its two modes (12 Mbit, or perhaps more honestly Mbaud, per second) “Full Speed”, at which point anything you name an even-faster one is going to be confusing.

Re: USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

#12
post #4

The whole concept of "SuperSpeed" made it more difficult to understand what was going on, so I'm very glad to see it go. A rare hiccup in the USB consortium's otherwise unbroken streak of making each generation more difficult to understand. The all-time prize has to go to the German wine producers, though, who regard a wine named "2001 Selbach-Oster Wehlener Sonnenheur Riesling Spaetlese Feinherb" as very precise and…

> 2001 Selbach-Oster Wehlener Sonnenheur Riesling Spaetlese Feinherb

It is a dry (feinherb) white (Riesling is a white wine berry variety) wine that has been harvested late in the season (Spätlese), making it have a higher alcohol level. Wehlener Sonnenheur is a geographical vineyard location (should probably read Wehlener Sonnenuhr, which is semi-famous and located at the Mosel, near Bernkastel), Selbach-Oster is the name of the winemaker, and 2001 is the year of production.

I fail to see what is complicated about that. But then I am German.

Re: USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

#17

This wouldn't be necessary if Big USB had better versioning numbers to begin with. They're right that customers shouldn't see "USB4 Gen whatever x LOL", but it shouldn't be a name underneath, either.

The problem is that techs push for branding to be things like a spec semantic version, but specs often just define options such that vendors would implement them in an interoperable way - while profiles are what define and test interoperability against mandatory feature sets.

Spec lines like USB 3.x and HDMI 2.x are meant to be interoperable sets of ever-increasing options, not an upward climb of mandatory minimum capabilities.

Vendors who didn't use SuperSpeed nomenclature before might have been doing so because it was clunky, but also might have been doing so because they didn't want to go through the effort of being certified against a profile (and in some cases, had nonconforming products)

This is simpler naming, but it remains to be seen whether implementors will suddenly care about certification. Those motherboards with the "USB 3.2 2x2 USB-A" red ports on the back are AFAIK un-certifiable and even non-conformant. No amount of marketing push for simpler names is going to help if vendors feel they get more value from just making stuff up.

Re: USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the mistake that USB 2.0 made calling 480 Mbps "High Speed". Now it seems incredibly slow by today's standards.

See also: high definition TV

Am I right in thinking that 4K and 8K are UHD 4K and UHD 8K?

I guess this debacle goes even further back with VHF and UHF.

Why do we insist on using such words when they don't clearly have an order?

Is "very" larger than "ultra" and where would "super" fit in there?

Re: USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

#19
At this point USB might as well auction their branding rights like sports stadiums:

- USB Coke Zero

- USB House of Dragon streaming exclusively on HBO

- USB Crypto.com

Consumers, Devices, and cables could continue ignoring it all but at least the consortium could have a new revenue stream.

Re: USB kills off SuperSpeed branding

#20
So if I've got two computers, each with a port labelled 40 Gbps and a USB cable labelled 40 Gbps, what's the protocol I can use to copy files at close to that? FWIW I used to run PLIP back in the nineties (IP over parallel port) to share my dialup Internet connection between my desktop and "laptop", so I'm not afraid of anything.
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