From the time USB first launched, it has become a major success, first with taking over the bulky slow parallel and SCSI cables that use to attach printers and scanners to later hooking up all sorts of gadgets to PCs, including even non-data based devices such as USB rechargeable batteries, LED lights, mini fans and so on. However, with devices requiring more and more bandwidth, particularly with HD content, large hard drives and upcoming external Blu-ray & HD DVD drives, Intel has recently demonstrated USB 3.0, which aims to provide a bandwidth of about 5Gbps or around 10 times the bandwidth of the current USB2.0 standard. This will also help it compete against eSATA (1.5Gbps to 3Gbps) for connecting external hard drives, not to mention putting it well ahead of Firewire's 1384b protocol (800Mbps).
In order to cram this much bandwidth over the cable, USB 3.0 makes use of fibre optic cabling. This cabling will also include the same wiring and physical connections as legacy USB cable to provide full backwards compatibility with at least USB2.0 devices. However, USB3.0 devices can only be connected using the new cable specification that features the fibre optic core.
The final version of USB3.0 is expected to be finished by the first half of 2008 with USB3.0 capable devices predicted to start appearing between 2009 and 2010. As USB has had a bad reputation for high CPU usage, it is unclear at this time if USB3.0 improves on this issue. So far, no info has been made available on the number of USB3.0 devices that can be chained, the maximum cable length, maximum supply current and so on.
Further information can be read in this source Ars Technica report.
