9 ms·

> The press release says that the update is “specifically targeted to developers at this time,” with final branding and marketing guides (including things like

by jl6 4y ago

> The press release says that the update is “specifically targeted to developers at this time,” with final branding and marketing guides (including things like logos) to come later. I choose to believe that there is still time to fix all this. Here is what they need to do: * Specify a set of power tiers: 15W, 30W, 100W. * Specify a set of bandwidth tiers: 10Gbps, 20Gbps, 40Gbps, 80Gbps * Specify a set of icons representing protocol capabilities (e.g. “DP” for DisplayPort) * Mandate that every port and cable is labelled with those two numbers and any associated icons. * Call it USB 5. * Drop all the “2x2” and “version 2” and “Gen2” and “SuperSpeed+” terminology. Apologies if I forgot some dimension of USB functionality.

imtringued 4y ago
Rather than damn names they should use colours like they did with USB 3.0
dwaite 4y ago
* Superspeed is the bandwidth tiers - 5, 20, 40, and 80 soon. High speed and Basic speed are for older and/or simpler devices (defined by USB 2.0). * They do specify power tiers, 15W is the minimum for chargers, 30W I believe is the minimum for power delivery cables, with cables being additionally certified (and marked) for 60W, 120w and 240W. * A certified cable with USB-C ports on both ends should be a USB cable, full-stop. Negotiation of alt modes is up to the devices on both ends. The problem is that there are a lot of vendors that use garbage terms like USB 3.2 2x2, which were never meant for the market at all. I suspect this is usually a consequence of those products not actually being certified, and thus avoiding using the official marks. IMHO, that there was anything publicly talking about "USB 3.2 2x2" is a side effect of the USB-IF not having the teeth to enforce use of the "USB" mark. Vendors would start using the right terms and running basic conformance if, say, they found they were no longer able to get their products imported. But the Implementers Forum is made up of the same vendors who are shipping broken devices, cheap charging cables, and motherboards with spec-invalid ports. When many people talk about USB 3.2, people assume there is some sort of semantic versioning of the port or cables itself. Thats not how specs work - everything which was USB 3.0 compliant is USB 3.2 compliant. If you want to mandate new things or break old ones, you create a new version like USB4. Many people have the same problem with HDMI 2.1a - there is no device certified with HDMI 2.0 that is incompatible with HDMI 2.1a. Thus, advertising 2.1a support means _nothing_ compared to advertising HDMI 2 support in general. It was a marketing failure that the HDMI licensing organization allowed vendors to use version numbers to imply _anything_, vs advertising that the devices you are connecting support features like 8K/60 or VRR.
zokier 4y ago
So that manufacturers&media could again completely ignore the guidelines and do their own thing anyways?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelt 4y ago
  If I design a standard and call it "USB 7.1 UltraSpeed++ 200Gbps Lightspeed Pro C, 4x4 64-QAM 100W PD with DisplayPort and PCI Express, Type R, brought to you by SalesForce" and the media refer to it as "USB 7" - is the media really at fault?
danhor 4y ago
> Mandate that every port and cable is labelled with those two numbers and any associated icons. That's the crux. Your first two points already exist, but no one is required to use them, so no one does. The only way to mandate this is making USB a standard not open as-is (ideally patent-protected). But that is the reason USB succeeded and changing this isn't a good idea.
- monocasa 4y ago
  'USB' is already a trademark, and could be used to force the issue.
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    Have fun buying "C-type computer cable with high speed and power" on Amazon from TREWLOKIJ, Shenzhen.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  As an alternative to making it a de jure standard, couldn’t correct labeling just be a requirement for licensing the trademark?
myhf 4y ago
There was a mandate for USB type-A cables to have a tactile USB logo on the "top" side, so that you could always feel when it was in the correct orientation. In the current generation I've seen devices with "DP" used to mean "Power Delivery" instead of "DisplayPort" Any mandate that is possible to ignore or misinterpret will just add noise.
- black3r 4y ago
  most of the cables I used did have that... but the "top" side was only ever usable with laptops... lots of desktops had the ports upside down, and other USB hosts like monitors, TVs, chargers, cars frequently have the ports sideways, or top/bottom...
xenadu02 4y ago
This will likely not happen. USB-IF is made up of manufacturers. The primary goal is lower BOM. The confusion is the point. Making everything optional is the point. USB-IF is not going to adopt a standard that requires every manufacturer to retool or redesign their Widget in order to slap a USB 4 label on it. Why would they vote for that? The whole 2x2/Gen2/etc thing was so some of the members could do some minor revisions then keep shipping their existing chips and products without them being considered "old", with a bit of "design by committee" mixed in. USB-IF doesn't give two shits what you or I or anyone else thinks about it, nor what our actual experiences with it are. They care about how much it costs. And by cost I mean an $0.01 difference per unit is considered a significant savings.
- dboreham 4y ago
  That penny dropping moment when you realize your pain point is someone else's business model.
- dataflow 4y ago
  > And by cost I mean an $0.01 difference per unit is considered a significant savings. Could someone ELI5 this line of thinking? Exactly how is a $0.01 saving so consequential? Is a better-performing $9.99 cable too expensive for some people but a $9.98 cable within their budget somehow? Is each manufacturer manufacturing 100 million cables and saving $1M here? What is the logic?
  - andrewstuart2 4y ago
    The cost of these cables is sub-dollar. Like probably less than $0.50. Let's say $0.50 for argument's sake. Bringing the cost down a penny means 2% more sellable product for the same input materials. And when the margins are in the $10 range, that's a huge amount of leverage. They're not passing the $0.01 savings along to their customers. Or even if they are (and say, charge you $0.01 less), it's still a huge differential after you consider the 20x margin. Quick math: Let's say 1 million cables at $0.50. That costs you $500k. If you get the cost down to $0.49, you just enabled another 20k cables to be manufactured, and another $200k in profit.
tiffanyh 4y ago
It’s not perfect & misses a few things, but something like this I assume. https://www.allion.com.tw/news-center/240w_epr_cable/ https://www.allion.com.tw/news-center/240w_epr_cable/
- watersb 4y ago
  It only gets worse: The logos for power ratings are visually indistinguishable from the logos for data rate. So you tell your family member that they need a 40-gigabit cable, they get a 60-Watt cable, and call you back to say it's still not working. At this point, the USB-IF is beyond incompetence and well over into malice. They hate you all.
throw0101c 4y ago
> Specify a set of power tiers: 15W, 30W, 100W. For the record, USB PD 3.1 has 28V, 36V, and 48V fixed voltages enabling up to 140W, 180W and 240W: * https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd
- londons_explore 4y ago
  What it needs is extensions that go up to 3 kW so that it can replace power outlets worldwide. It's totally possible to deliver 3kw in the form factor of USBC safely. Obviously there needs to be extra circuitry in both ends of the connection, but that extra circuitry should still be cheaper than today's thick dumb AC cables.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    One mismanufactured cable away from a fire I imagine. There’s a review on Amazon by a (at least at the time) Google of a specific USB-C cable that would burn out the USB-C port on MacBooks because the cable wasn’t manufactured well. In fact, that guy has many many reviews on Amazon of the various defects in various cables (he stopped once that cable burned out his port).
  - ac29 4y ago
    > It's totally possible to deliver 3kw in the form factor of USBC safely Wouldnt that take like 400V? Not sure how safe that would be.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      And 10,000 volts build up on your body when you rub a balloon on your head... With high voltages, it's all down to how many joules you allow to be dissipated in a human. Ie. Current*voltage*time. Specifically, anything over about 0.01 Joules is dangerous. To use high voltages in a consumer product you need to limit either the current or the time, and you need to do it in a way that is very robust to being chewed on by a baby in a bath. And it needs to be robust to that even when built by a corner-cutting factory. One approach to that is to have either end of the link 'test' the other end - ie. Simulate a human touching the wire. If power isn't turned off fast enough to be in spec, then the remote end or cable isn't working correctly and shouldnt be used.
sixothree 4y ago
> Drop all the “2x2” and “version 2” and “Gen2” and “SuperSpeed+” terminology. I can't believe this is a modern standard. It looks like marketing deception, not a standard.
- lazide 4y ago
  Nothing says they can’t standardize marketing deception
_hypx 4y ago
I wonder how long before some group of manufacturers comes out and say “Ah fuck it, just make a new connector with a new baseline level of performance!”
Nition 4y ago
How much more would each cable cost if they all had to do the max feature set? 100W, 80Gps, support for everything. Is there anything the requires them to not all support the max feature set, apart from cost - some use case that would break, or be dangerous, or be mutually incompatible with another feature?
- ak217 4y ago
  $40 more, representing roughly a 80% increase. TB4 cables over 1.5ft require inline active signal boosting/filtering chips.
  - Nition 4y ago
    Ouch. Maybe we could get it down to two variants, the cheap one and the expensive one? They could even have different-looking plugs...
- klempner 4y ago
  A minimum cable -- USB 2.0 and 3 amps only -- can be considerably thinner. You don't need the extra USB 3 wires and the power wires don't need to be nearly as thick. It isn't just a question of cost -- if you want a long cable to charge a phone, you'd probably prefer it to be thinner and more flexible, and you don't need the extra power.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gardaani 4y ago
Certified USB cables have markings indicating what type of cable it is. Power can be 60W or 240W. Speed can be 20Gbps or 40Gbps. Here's how the logos look like https://audioxpress.com/news/new-certified-usb-logo-program-for-usb4-usb-type-c-and-usb-power-delivery-specifications https://audioxpress.com/news/new-certified-usb-logo-program-... If you buy a certified USB4 cable, it has the markings and should work as you expect it to work. If you buy a cheap Chinese cable, it won't have any markings or it has wrong markings. It won't be possible to mandate that every cheap Chinese cable has correct markings. It would require Amazon or Walmart to do some kind of quality checking for all their sellers, which won't happen. They allow SSD scams, so they also allow USB scams. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381
- manholio 4y ago
  > If you buy a cheap Chinese cable, it won't have any markings or it has wrong markings. That is, until the Chinese get on this fancy new internet thing.
Dalewyn 4y ago
I would make it dead simple: A whole new version number for any difference from the former; starting from USB3. * USB3.1Gen1? USB3 (because it literally is). * USB3.1Gen2? USB4. * USB3.2Gen1? USB3 (because it literally is). * USB3.2Gen2? USB4. * USB3.2Gen1x2? USB5. * USB3.2Gen2x2? USB6. * USB4Gen2x1? USB7. * USB4Gen2x2? USB8. * USB4Gen3x1? USB9. * USB4Gen3x2? USB10. * USB4v2? USB11. Power Delivery? Likewise one whole version number (eg: PD100W) based off watts carried, and append that version number to the USB version number. So for example: USB9 PD100W, USB7 PD30W, etc. Dead. Fucking. Simple. The U in USB stands for Universal. The first step to being universal is to be so dead fucking simple even your technologically illiterate grandma can tell things apart. I hate the Chrome Versioning System, but it is by far dead fucking simple, and USB could use some dead fucking simpleness with its version numbers.
sschueller 4y ago
Since stuff keeps getting renamed or added I vote to have a requirement to have a display on each cable indicating to me it's capabilities. The manufacturer should then be required to update the firmware on this cable to match any changes. /s
naikrovek 4y ago
> Mandate that every port and cable is labelled with those two numbers and any associated icons lol there are still HDMI cables without an HDMI logo on them. There are still plain old full speed USB cables without the USB logo on them. China alone will destroy this single requirement and laugh as they sell hundreds of millions of cables per year. I really do wish it were possible to mandate this. Things would be easier.
Someone 4y ago
You forget one very important item: * Somehow get all manufacturers to only create quality cables complying with the standard whose capabilities match what they say they do. That won’t happen. Some manufacturer will start making a cable that’s longer than what the spec says is possible, or will try to get away with a bit less shielding or a bit less conductor in the cables than what the spec requires, or will decrease quality control, so that their cables are fine, on average, but 1:1000 buyers will get a melon that’s sub-spec.
bick_nyers 4y ago
Someone should just do this for them, maintain a database with Amazon etc. links and validated power and bandwidth tiers that does this naming for them, and if enough people exclusively only use products that are tested on that site, then they won't be able to ignore that demand without affecting their bottom line.

by jl6 4y ago

imtringued 4y ago

Rather than damn names they should use colours like they did with USB 3.0

dwaite 4y ago

* Superspeed is the bandwidth tiers - 5, 20, 40, and 80 soon. High speed and Basic speed are for older and/or simpler devices (defined by USB 2.0). * They do specify power tiers, 15W is the minimum for chargers, 30W I believe is the minimum for power delivery cables, with cables being additionally certified (and marked) for 60W, 120w and 240W. * A certified cable with USB-C ports on both ends should be a USB cable, full-stop. Negotiation of alt modes is up to the devices on both ends. The problem is that there are a lot of vendors that use garbage terms like USB 3.2 2x2, which were never meant for the market at all. I suspect this is usually a consequence of those products not actually being certified, and thus avoiding using the official marks. IMHO, that there was anything publicly talking about "USB 3.2 2x2" is a side effect of the USB-IF not having the teeth to enforce use of the "USB" mark. Vendors would start using the right terms and running basic conformance if, say, they found they were no longer able to get their products imported. But the Implementers Forum is made up of the same vendors who are shipping broken devices, cheap charging cables, and motherboards with spec-invalid ports. When many people talk about USB 3.2, people assume there is some sort of semantic versioning of the port or cables itself. Thats not how specs work - everything which was USB 3.0 compliant is USB 3.2 compliant. If you want to mandate new things or break old ones, you create a new version like USB4. Many people have the same problem with HDMI 2.1a - there is no device certified with HDMI 2.0 that is incompatible with HDMI 2.1a. Thus, advertising 2.1a support means _nothing_ compared to advertising HDMI 2 support in general. It was a marketing failure that the HDMI licensing organization allowed vendors to use version numbers to imply _anything_, vs advertising that the devices you are connecting support features like 8K/60 or VRR.

zokier 4y ago

So that manufacturers&media could again completely ignore the guidelines and do their own thing anyways?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
michaelt 4y ago
If I design a standard and call it "USB 7.1 UltraSpeed++ 200Gbps Lightspeed Pro C, 4x4 64-QAM 100W PD with DisplayPort and PCI Express, Type R, brought to you by SalesForce" and the media refer to it as "USB 7" - is the media really at fault?

danhor 4y ago

> Mandate that every port and cable is labelled with those two numbers and any associated icons. That's the crux. Your first two points already exist, but no one is required to use them, so no one does. The only way to mandate this is making USB a standard not open as-is (ideally patent-protected). But that is the reason USB succeeded and changing this isn't a good idea.

monocasa 4y ago
'USB' is already a trademark, and could be used to force the issue.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  Have fun buying "C-type computer cable with high speed and power" on Amazon from TREWLOKIJ, Shenzhen.
CharlesW 4y ago
As an alternative to making it a de jure standard, couldn’t correct labeling just be a requirement for licensing the trademark?

myhf 4y ago

There was a mandate for USB type-A cables to have a tactile USB logo on the "top" side, so that you could always feel when it was in the correct orientation. In the current generation I've seen devices with "DP" used to mean "Power Delivery" instead of "DisplayPort" Any mandate that is possible to ignore or misinterpret will just add noise.

black3r 4y ago
most of the cables I used did have that... but the "top" side was only ever usable with laptops... lots of desktops had the ports upside down, and other USB hosts like monitors, TVs, chargers, cars frequently have the ports sideways, or top/bottom...

xenadu02 4y ago

This will likely not happen. USB-IF is made up of manufacturers. The primary goal is lower BOM. The confusion is the point. Making everything optional is the point. USB-IF is not going to adopt a standard that requires every manufacturer to retool or redesign their Widget in order to slap a USB 4 label on it. Why would they vote for that? The whole 2x2/Gen2/etc thing was so some of the members could do some minor revisions then keep shipping their existing chips and products without them being considered "old", with a bit of "design by committee" mixed in. USB-IF doesn't give two shits what you or I or anyone else thinks about it, nor what our actual experiences with it are. They care about how much it costs. And by cost I mean an $0.01 difference per unit is considered a significant savings.

dboreham 4y ago
That penny dropping moment when you realize your pain point is someone else's business model.
dataflow 4y ago
> And by cost I mean an $0.01 difference per unit is considered a significant savings. Could someone ELI5 this line of thinking? Exactly how is a $0.01 saving so consequential? Is a better-performing $9.99 cable too expensive for some people but a $9.98 cable within their budget somehow? Is each manufacturer manufacturing 100 million cables and saving $1M here? What is the logic?
- andrewstuart2 4y ago
  The cost of these cables is sub-dollar. Like probably less than $0.50. Let's say $0.50 for argument's sake. Bringing the cost down a penny means 2% more sellable product for the same input materials. And when the margins are in the $10 range, that's a huge amount of leverage. They're not passing the $0.01 savings along to their customers. Or even if they are (and say, charge you $0.01 less), it's still a huge differential after you consider the 20x margin. Quick math: Let's say 1 million cables at $0.50. That costs you $500k. If you get the cost down to $0.49, you just enabled another 20k cables to be manufactured, and another $200k in profit.

tiffanyh 4y ago

It’s not perfect & misses a few things, but something like this I assume. https://www.allion.com.tw/news-center/240w_epr_cable/ https://www.allion.com.tw/news-center/240w_epr_cable/

watersb 4y ago
It only gets worse: The logos for power ratings are visually indistinguishable from the logos for data rate. So you tell your family member that they need a 40-gigabit cable, they get a 60-Watt cable, and call you back to say it's still not working. At this point, the USB-IF is beyond incompetence and well over into malice. They hate you all.

throw0101c 4y ago

> Specify a set of power tiers: 15W, 30W, 100W. For the record, USB PD 3.1 has 28V, 36V, and 48V fixed voltages enabling up to 140W, 180W and 240W: * https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd

londons_explore 4y ago
What it needs is extensions that go up to 3 kW so that it can replace power outlets worldwide. It's totally possible to deliver 3kw in the form factor of USBC safely. Obviously there needs to be extra circuitry in both ends of the connection, but that extra circuitry should still be cheaper than today's thick dumb AC cables.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  One mismanufactured cable away from a fire I imagine. There’s a review on Amazon by a (at least at the time) Google of a specific USB-C cable that would burn out the USB-C port on MacBooks because the cable wasn’t manufactured well. In fact, that guy has many many reviews on Amazon of the various defects in various cables (he stopped once that cable burned out his port).
- ac29 4y ago
  > It's totally possible to deliver 3kw in the form factor of USBC safely Wouldnt that take like 400V? Not sure how safe that would be.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    And 10,000 volts build up on your body when you rub a balloon on your head... With high voltages, it's all down to how many joules you allow to be dissipated in a human. Ie. Current*voltage*time. Specifically, anything over about 0.01 Joules is dangerous. To use high voltages in a consumer product you need to limit either the current or the time, and you need to do it in a way that is very robust to being chewed on by a baby in a bath. And it needs to be robust to that even when built by a corner-cutting factory. One approach to that is to have either end of the link 'test' the other end - ie. Simulate a human touching the wire. If power isn't turned off fast enough to be in spec, then the remote end or cable isn't working correctly and shouldnt be used.

sixothree 4y ago

> Drop all the “2x2” and “version 2” and “Gen2” and “SuperSpeed+” terminology. I can't believe this is a modern standard. It looks like marketing deception, not a standard.

lazide 4y ago
Nothing says they can’t standardize marketing deception

_hypx 4y ago

I wonder how long before some group of manufacturers comes out and say “Ah fuck it, just make a new connector with a new baseline level of performance!”

Nition 4y ago

How much more would each cable cost if they all had to do the max feature set? 100W, 80Gps, support for everything. Is there anything the requires them to not all support the max feature set, apart from cost - some use case that would break, or be dangerous, or be mutually incompatible with another feature?

ak217 4y ago
$40 more, representing roughly a 80% increase. TB4 cables over 1.5ft require inline active signal boosting/filtering chips.
- Nition 4y ago
  Ouch. Maybe we could get it down to two variants, the cheap one and the expensive one? They could even have different-looking plugs...
klempner 4y ago
A minimum cable -- USB 2.0 and 3 amps only -- can be considerably thinner. You don't need the extra USB 3 wires and the power wires don't need to be nearly as thick. It isn't just a question of cost -- if you want a long cable to charge a phone, you'd probably prefer it to be thinner and more flexible, and you don't need the extra power.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gardaani 4y ago

Certified USB cables have markings indicating what type of cable it is. Power can be 60W or 240W. Speed can be 20Gbps or 40Gbps. Here's how the logos look like https://audioxpress.com/news/new-certified-usb-logo-program-for-usb4-usb-type-c-and-usb-power-delivery-specifications https://audioxpress.com/news/new-certified-usb-logo-program-... If you buy a certified USB4 cable, it has the markings and should work as you expect it to work. If you buy a cheap Chinese cable, it won't have any markings or it has wrong markings. It won't be possible to mandate that every cheap Chinese cable has correct markings. It would require Amazon or Walmart to do some kind of quality checking for all their sellers, which won't happen. They allow SSD scams, so they also allow USB scams. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381

manholio 4y ago
> If you buy a cheap Chinese cable, it won't have any markings or it has wrong markings. That is, until the Chinese get on this fancy new internet thing.

Dalewyn 4y ago

I would make it dead simple: A whole new version number for any difference from the former; starting from USB3. * USB3.1Gen1? USB3 (because it literally is). * USB3.1Gen2? USB4. * USB3.2Gen1? USB3 (because it literally is). * USB3.2Gen2? USB4. * USB3.2Gen1x2? USB5. * USB3.2Gen2x2? USB6. * USB4Gen2x1? USB7. * USB4Gen2x2? USB8. * USB4Gen3x1? USB9. * USB4Gen3x2? USB10. * USB4v2? USB11. Power Delivery? Likewise one whole version number (eg: PD100W) based off watts carried, and append that version number to the USB version number. So for example: USB9 PD100W, USB7 PD30W, etc. Dead. Fucking. Simple. The U in USB stands for Universal. The first step to being universal is to be so dead fucking simple even your technologically illiterate grandma can tell things apart. I hate the Chrome Versioning System, but it is by far dead fucking simple, and USB could use some dead fucking simpleness with its version numbers.

sschueller 4y ago

Since stuff keeps getting renamed or added I vote to have a requirement to have a display on each cable indicating to me it's capabilities. The manufacturer should then be required to update the firmware on this cable to match any changes. /s

naikrovek 4y ago

> Mandate that every port and cable is labelled with those two numbers and any associated icons lol there are still HDMI cables without an HDMI logo on them. There are still plain old full speed USB cables without the USB logo on them. China alone will destroy this single requirement and laugh as they sell hundreds of millions of cables per year. I really do wish it were possible to mandate this. Things would be easier.

Someone 4y ago

You forget one very important item: * Somehow get all manufacturers to only create quality cables complying with the standard whose capabilities match what they say they do. That won’t happen. Some manufacturer will start making a cable that’s longer than what the spec says is possible, or will try to get away with a bit less shielding or a bit less conductor in the cables than what the spec requires, or will decrease quality control, so that their cables are fine, on average, but 1:1000 buyers will get a melon that’s sub-spec.

bick_nyers 4y ago

Someone should just do this for them, maintain a database with Amazon etc. links and validated power and bandwidth tiers that does this naming for them, and if enough people exclusively only use products that are tested on that site, then they won't be able to ignore that demand without affecting their bottom line.