According to AMD and nVIDIA, Intel is not sharing their specs for the USB 3.0 open host controller. It is officially expected to appear on the market in 2009 and comes with a lot of bandwidth upgrade when compared with the USB 2.0 so we are dealing with something special here. The possibility of going ahead in this market could lead to a lot of money and there is a big chance that both AMD and nVIDIA think that Intel is trying to do this.

USB-IF was founded in 1995 by Intel in collaboration with others like HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Texs Instruments. USB-IF is now working together to bring USB 3.0 to life (it is also being called “PCI Express over cable” so you might also find it under this name). Bandwidth will be increased 10 times as compared with USB 2.0 and transfer will be at around 5 gigabits per second. A lot of the intellectual property behind this new technology was not created by Intel but nVIDIA and AMD think that the company is currently holding a lot of information to itself. They claim that Intel is working silicon so the open host controller is working but they are not giving specifications to chipset and processor makers. Withholding such info would lead to a market advantage of 5 to nine months according to the two companies.

Intel claims that it will only give the specifications once they are finished and this is not the case at the moment. If the specs would be given if they are not complete then it would be incomplete so companies would end up building different chipsets and devices would not be compatible. Intel also said that they are behind on the project and this might cause resentment.

Now the problem is that AMD and nVIDIA claim that they will develop their own open host controller for USB 3.0. Both companies say that creating different open host controllers would mean incompatibilities between products and USB 3.0 controllers, the same thing that Intel claims. A source said that AMD is actually starting development on the open host controller right now and nVIDIA says that the first meeting on the alternate version (the one different from what Intel will bring in) is scheduled next week.

We just hope that this will not have a big impact on the market and on consumers.