Still on track for 'middle of the year' on this? Thanks!
Newbie
Still on track for 'middle of the year' on this? Thanks!
Administrator
There have been delays and it is now looking more likely towards the end of the year.Originally Posted by estelzer
Newbie
Hi,
It is in the middle of the year of 2012. Are there any news from the USB 3.0 Passmark?
BR Andreas
Administrator
As noted above a few days back, there have been delays and it is now looking more likely towards the end of the year.
We have some prototype firmware running now on a USB3 microcontroller. So we can do some basic looping of data and benchmarking. But there is much more to be done before it is a commercial product.
Junior Member
I am extremely interested in USB 3.0 loopbacks as well. I need them like...oh next week...LOL! Have you made any progress? I don't know about thousands...but I'm sure I could use 100.
Administrator
Finally some progress to talk about.
As of 10 Aug 2012:
We have a working hardware prototype.
Basic firmware is done.
Basic device driver is done.
Basic application level test software is done.
At the moment the hardware looks a bit of a mess. It is a mix of a hand build board and a couple of hardware development kits. Here it is,
We are getting some proper integrated PCBs (printed circuit boards) made up and once that is done it will look much more like a real device rather than a mess of wires. Takes weeks to get PCBs made however. After that we need to get a plastic case done, get the final firmware done, do a lot more testing then order in all the component parts to build a few thousand units. All this will take time. Lead times on components can be a couple of months in some cases.
Junior Member
It sounds like your timeline matches up with mine pretty well. I am looking for 1Q 2013 before I need them. Good work guys!! Please keep me posted if you need any beta testing.
Administrator
Took a bit longer than expected, but we have got the printed circuit board (PCB) design done. Here it is. The USB3 connector is at the top of the board, the white rectangle near the bottom is space for a small LCD screen.
Next step is to get it manufactured in small quantities and then do some testing. Concurrently we'll be doing some more work on the firmware coding and the plastic case design.
We have put around 8 months full time work into this now. Finger's crossed it actually works.
Administrator
We did some benchmark testing with various different USB3 host controllers.
Here are the results,
USB3 Host controller
ManufacturerRead Transfer Rate
(MBytes/sec)Write Transfer Rate
(MBytes/sec)Asmedia 300 195 Fresco 185 148 Intel 283 337 NEC 300 195 VIA 215 290
These are getting kind of close to the hypothetically speed of USB3 (also known as super speed). The advertised speed of USB3 is 4.8Gbits/sec, but because of 8b10b encoding 20% of the bandwidth is immediately lost (as 10 bits on the wire are needed to represent 8 bits in the CPU). More bandwidth is lost as a result of the protocol used & latencies in the devices. Also obvious, from the table above, is that the implementation of the host controller in silicon impacts on the performance. These measurements were taken on different high end machines, but on one motherboard we had both the Intel and the VIA chips on the same motherboard, meaning that it isn't the CPU speed or PCI bus that results in the difference in performance. (In fact the CPU utilization is actually fairly low, under 25% of a single core).
Note that this benchmark measures the performance of the USB3 port directly. It doesn't have a disk or flash drive connected to the USB3 device, so there is no slow down related to the storage of the data on disk. (If you look around elsewhere on the net you'll find other USB3 benchmark reporting numbers like 100 - 150MB/sec, as they are really measuring the speed of the disk drive or flash memory and not the speed of the USB3 interface).
Testing also revelled that we have a problem with the device keeping up with the write speed of the Intel host controller, as it crashed after 10 seconds or so at full speed. The USB loopback plug contains an ARM 926, 32bit RISC CPU, running at 200Mhz. In theory this is fast enough to record and clear the data buffers as they fill up with incoming data, so the cause of the crash will need some further investigation.
There was also a couple of instances where the plug only initially enumerated at USB2 speeds. A reboot of the PC was required to get it to work, it isn't clear at the moment why a reboot was required the 1st time a USB3 device was used. Might be a problem in the drivers for the host controller.
Junior Member
Sounds like you are making some progress. I am extremely interested in your progress and I am in need of these as soon as you can make some available. I had such good luck with the USB 2.0 loopbacks, I am really looking forward to getting my hands on the 3.0's.
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