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LAS VEGAS--The president of the USB Implementers Forum discussed the arrival of USB 3.0 and gave a brief demonstration of transfer speeds on a Hewlett-Packard laptop

at the Consumer Electronics Show.

In case anyone was in doubt, USB 3.0 is a lot faster than the current 2.0 version. Below is a photo of a display Asus had at CES, showing a comparison of the time it takes to d

rag a 2.1GB file from a laptop to an external hard disk drive using USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. An

d in the second video segment, Jeff Ravencraft, president of the USB Implementers Forum, provides a taste of the gaping difference in transfer speeds between USB 2.0 and 3.0.

And another certainty: USB 3.0 is now available to consumers on laptops from HP and Asus, among others.

USB is also more power efficient than 2.0. "This uses one-third of the power it would take on USB 2.0," said Ravencraft, in an interview

at CES. "And it's backward compatible,"

he said, meaning it can also handle peripherals that use older USB standards.

And speaking of peripherals, Western Digital has announced a new WD My Book based on the USB 3.0 specification with an adapter card, which will make an existing desk

top PC USB 3.0-compatible.

Also, cards that go into a laptop's ExpressCard slot are available, Ravencraft said. This allows an existing laptop to be upgraded to 3.0.

HP is now

offering an Envy 15 laptop model with USB 3.0 connectors, and Acer was showing a raft of laptops on the CES show floor with the new standard,

including the NX90Jq.

DisplayLink makes the chip that powers USB video docks from companies like HP and Toshiba; today an adapter lets a PC or Mac drive up to six screens over USB, but the resolution hasn't been enough for a 30-inch screen. The USB 3 prototype DisplayLink will change that.

The blue USB 3.0 cable runs from the prototype to a PC under the table that's playing the movie; the black cable runs to the HDMI port and this is the PC playing HD video out of the USB 3.0 port.

This uses DisplayLink's new lossless compression algorithm designed for high speed playback. "At the same time we're transferring native

HD video to the PC for decoding," said DisplayLink's Marketing and Business Development vice president Dennis Crespo, which means the system is delivering a huge amount of video information simultaneously.

The new system will be able to drive much bigger screens – 30-inch and above – and there's support for Windows 7's transparency effects, even on screens bigger than that. That's only the prototype, and Crespo expects the actual frame rate will be closer to 60 in the final chip.

It will take about six months to turn the current prototype into a chip ("It's probably the most complicated thing we've

done technically," he told us) and docks with the new hardware should be on sale by the end of the year.

Sources:

Brooke Crothers

Mary Branscombe