USB needed a speed boost. Backing up onto an external HDD via USB (and its surprising how many still dont have eSATA connections) is painful.

Bye bye FireWire... we hardly knew ye.

USB3.0 may come with cable limitations (extra wires, extra thickness, reduced length), expensive cables (>USD$40 / 2m), more expensive sillicon. It has not been shown how devices will be able to burst that much data far less use much of the sustained bandwidth. It's not just the cost of meeting the spec (license cost?) but also the cost of implementation (space, power, socket, bus, R&D).

USB 2.0 took a long time to get to >50% usage of claimed bandwidth. Can the rest of the computer cope with such a large bandwidth potential with existing protocol and driver stack ? Will it clock-down to reduce power consumption and reduce required data buffering ? Current USB 2.0 implementations are not optimal and rarely reach over 35MB/s of a 60MB/s potenial.

In 2007, several top selling digital cameras had USB1.1, how long will it take for them to upgrade to USB3.0 ?

FireWire designs can provide more power than USB, 10-30w vs 2.5w, and thus allowed many more devices to forget the ugly power pack.

FireWire also allowed predictable bandwidth and latency for video/sound where USB is arbitary and unpredictable. There has also been FireWire implimentations that have been bad (eg. so few use the 800 spec, USB/Firewrie ext. HD that would corupt when using Firewire connection).

isn't that also the SATA 3 spec? Those are some nice speeds that will be difficult to achieve on the actual devices.

I've always wondered, if PCIE and other specs like this seem to receive magical boosts in speed every so often, what is holding them back, exactly?

Does this mean USB 4.0 will be ludicrous speed?

It looks like USB 3.0 won't be on the new Core i7 motherboards (X58 or derivatives). I'm guessing we'll have to wait one more generation before this goes into it...