USB 4: Double speed version 2.0 announced

On September 2, 2022By Garmin Philip

New USB standard

The USB connection has been updated again: With USB 4 Version 2.0, data transfer rates of up to 80 GBit/s should be possible.

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USB Type-C — USB 4 2.0, as the successor to the previous USB 3 standard, is intended to achieve significantly higher speeds

New USB standard: As the USB Promoter Group, which is responsible for the development of the connection, announced in a developer update, the USB 3 successor USB 4 received its first update to version 2.0. With USB4 2.0, the developers promise transmission speeds of up to 80 gigabits per second – compared to the first version, this would mean a doubling of the data rate.

On the hardware side, new controllers are required for USB 4 2.0 in the respective devices in order to be able to achieve the targeted data rates. For end users, on the other hand, no change is necessary for implementation: the previously used passive USB-C cables should be able to reach the specified speeds; According to the announcement, newly specified active USB-C cables will also be added in the future.

According to the document, the new standard is backward compatible with USB4 version 1.0, USB 3.2, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt 3 and should also provide noticeable speed improvements in these specifications. Among other things, the tunneling of data in USB 3.2 can break the previous limit of 20 GBit/s.

In addition, USB 4 2.0 is also to be adapted to other standards. Specifically, it is probably about the support of DisplayPort 2.0 and PCI-Express 5.0, which should become the new primarily used connection versions in their respective areas of responsibility in the future. The latter can theoretically even reach a speed of up to 128 gigabytes per second when using sixteen lanes and has already been announced as a planned interface for the upcoming AMD 7000 processors.