What is USB 3.1?

目錄

Before talking about USB 3.1, let’s take a look at USB.

The full name of USB is Universal Serial Bus. The USB specification used around the world was developed by the USB Implementers Forum USB (USB-IF) developer forum. The first official version, USB 1.0, was launched in January 1996. At present, the common USB versions on the market are divided into two standards: 2.0 and 3.0; and the USB Alliance also announced the latest USB 3.1 specification at the end of 2013. Some USB 3.1 trademarks will be written as SuperSpeed +, and its full name is “SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps”.

usb 3.1
The logo of each USB specification is different. From left to right are USB 1.0, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1.

The USB 3.1 specification features:

  1. The power supply can be up to 100W, and the voltage and current will increase.
  2. In addition to supporting the original Type-A and Type-B interfaces, it adds a Type-C interface.
  3. To reduce encoding loss, from 20% of the previous generation USB 3.0 to 3%, and change the encoding method to 128b / 132b.
  4. The transmission speed can reach 10Gb / s, which is twice as fast as USB 3.0, and is backward compatible with USB 2.0 / 1.0
  5. Added USB A / V audio and video transmission function, which can provide 9.8Gbps bandwidth, and support up to 4K picture quality / 30FPS screen output.
  6. Simply put, USB 3.1 improves the power transmission specification, reduces power consumption, is faster, and supports the new Type-C connector.

The bandwidth and transfer speed of each generation of USB specifications have improved. Compared with the first generation of USB 1.0, the latest USB 3.1 has a bandwidth increase of 6,826 times and a transfer speed of 5,333 times! It takes 9.25 hours to transfer a 25GB HD movie using USB 1.0. Transfer in USB 3.1 takes only 35 seconds.

Next news: What is USB Type-C?