USB Upgrades

USB Upgrades Ahead: Faster speeds, more mobility, and greater power efficiency expected to begin hitting designs next year                                                      

 Universal Serial Bus is about to get faster, more versatile—and far more ubiquitous.

Chairman of the USB Implementer’s Forum and a technology strategist at Intel, provided a glimpse of the upcoming roadmap that includes three separate efforts. The first effort is to clean up problems with existing versions and make them more efficient. The second effort will focus on speeding up the standard through Super-speed USB. The third effort is focused on wireless USB. All of these efforts will be rolled out over the next couple of years as the standard continues to make inroads into all electronics.

“USB is the most successful interface in history,” He told attendees at a Synopsys’ Experts on the Road IP Seminar recently. He further said the next step would be to focus on power, both in terms of USB’s efficiency and its ability to charge devices. “When we first designed USB 2.0, than there was not the focus on power there is today. But power in portable devices is the number one thing that has to be delivered.”

The problem now is that the host constantly is sending calls out to the device through the USB interface asking if there is traffic; this requires power on both sides. He said that would change in future versions of USB to allow the devices to power down when there is no traffic. This change will be combined with new functionality, such as the ability to charge more devices over USB, and the ability to have devices tradeoff between being the host or being a device connected to the host. For example, a car stereo or a set-top box will be able to act as either a host or the connected device to another host, such as an MP3 player.

Super-speed USB 3.0, first announced at the Intel® Developer’s Forum last fall, will begin showing up in product designs in 2009, propelled by a standards promotion group established last fall by such heavyweights as Intel, HP, NXP, NEC, Microsoft and Texas Instruments.

The new standard will allow a 27-Gbyte high-definition movie to download in 70 seconds, compared to 13.9 minutes using USB 2.0 and 9.3 hours using USB 1. Under the new standard, a 4-Mbyte song can be downloaded over USB 3.0 in .01 seconds, compared to .1 seconds using USB 2.0 and 5.3 seconds using USB 1.0.

Chairman of the USB technology strategist at Intel said there are more than 160 companies contributing to the USB 3.0 specification at the moment. He said the next step would be to move into the adopter stage with broad deployment of USB 3.0 expected in 2010.

Let Win XP to retire

Let Windows XP to retire honorably

Windows XP should be allowed to retire honorably:  our view that Windows XP has 66.7% worldwide acknowledgements, kept as a beacon light for further improvement. Microsoft will continue supporting Windows XP until April 2014 to help ease the transition to Windows 7.

Internet Explorer-9 not made applicable to Windows XP as IE- 9 can’t work with a 9 year old version Internet Explorer-9 because of its Hardware Acceleration through Direct3D, no Win 7 Taskbar having unique visual benefits; the security benefits built into Win 7.

We need further developments/ improvements/ enhancements; learning from earlier well done work XP, we can’t ignore the requirements of speed, clarity, ease and innovative Operative System with Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s motivation to get more users to buy Windows 7" adopting XP Mode, Virtual PC and IE-6’s inheritance, also to keep development Microsoft had to give value to new innovative O S to protract its priced tag.

Rather during IE-6, there was lull when Microsoft was getting 95% of market share: Result Chrome, Firefox had also come up, lowering the Microsoft' win-XP market share. It is between 7 years when Chrome and Firefox came. Windows had to develop Operative System-7 and the faster development with new Internet Explorer-9 came having beautiful & enhanced features in comparison to old friend; Win. Simultaneously Chrome & Firefox are trying to beat in performance as Microsoft which had given LULL time to grow and develop further.

Now Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s SVG technique has been developed to create two-dimensional shapes and figures on a website by adding a few codes rather than the actual use of images & its style, style sheet; the code that a webpage uses to define its appearance and formatting. Styles can define webpage attributes such as fonts; columns, headings, and how images are displayed were not available earlier.

Their Application & hardware acceleration together improved to speed up performance, I E-9 uses the power of your computer’s graphics processor unit (GPU) to handle the graphics-heavy-tasks and high-definition video with clear, smooth & true colors and delivers a faster and immersive web experience and we can feel that websites perform like the program that is installed on our computer. Microsoft had been awarded a patent for GPU-Accelerated video encoding whereas

Google had to pull back on planned hardware acceleration APIs for CSS rendering. Microsoft, meanwhile, is making a big play for hardware acceleration in its Internet Explorer 9 browser.

“Thus, there is a need for computers to more efficiently perform motion estimation so that video encoding can be accelerated without simply improving the speed of CPUs.”

Win- 7’s Integration with own Operative System and Internet Explorer i.e.Win-7 & IE-9 incorporating features of both together with Download Manager have been a sophisticated integration. Now we can pin websites with Taskbar of Windows 7 which is having Jump-in feature of Win-7: a complete integration on your desktop so that you can access them later with a single click.  Its Add-on Performance Advisor indicates when an add-on is slowing down your browser performance, and then gives you the power to disable or remove it. I Er-9’s translucent application bar, the new age buttons and the shadowing / glowing certainly help create an application beautiful.

The most important is browser language called JavaScript engine: their “SunSpider was not effective but now IE-9 has achieved & their with browser language called “Chakra” JavaScript engine, virtually all programs/applications.  

Market competition has made Google to push the first official release of Chrome 8 & is representing Google’s efforts to catch up with Internet Explorer-9 especially in relation to hardware acceleration capabilities taking power of the graphics processing unit in order to better the browsing experience related to HTML5, text, media content, etc.

Just like IE-9, Chrome 8 is also taking the force of 3D graphics application programming interfaces, and Google Chrome 8 contains full hardware acceleration support, native 3D graphics.  Also better support for Chrome O S and their hardware acceleration, the attempt to differentiate through speed has most of the content in web pages and now accelerated with improvement in the smoothness of UI animations, especially when detaching and re-attaching a tab or for the interface as well.

Streaming in Win-7 and Remoting in Google Chrome, users can connect to remote applications. The Labs feature is visible if you have a @google email account. 

Google has already been focusing on the actual viewing area of the browser enabling users to view more of the websites they are visiting. Chrome OS-related Labs features are giving a very good competition to Microsoft which is trying keep its the predominance of Microsoft having the Operative System together with Internet Explorer together.  We must retire Windows XP honorably and give chance with Healthy competition to all to come with their best Product.