The latest iteration of the USB standard, USB4, is almost here with the organizations behind the widely used USB standard releasing new information on the upcoming standard. The new USB4 standard (incidentally, without a space between ‘USB’ and the number 4) promises faster and improved compatibility, with no need to pay close attention to which cable or port you are using.
The new standard which was initially announced in March of this year has since undergone a few more technical changes in the intervening months. As the standard moves from idea to reality, one can expect a few more changes, all beneficial to users.
So far, there are three main improvements in USB4 over USB 3 (or 3.2, or 3.1 gen2v2… the naming system is a mess): The first is better speed; USB4 tops out at 40 gigabits per second, twice the speed of the latest version of USB 3 and 8 times the speed of the original USB 3 standard, which was of course itself way faster than what it was replacing. It will also support the max speed of previous cables and interfaces.
The second enhancement is Improved display/data splitting. USB 3 introduced the ability to use a single cable that sends power, data and a video signal (basically just more but specialized data). This was great, but sometimes, depending on how you set it up, it could only send one or the other, or speeds were greatly reduced. USB4 does this much better, so if you have a monitor that uses 8 Gbps for its video bandwidth, the remaining full 32 Gbps will be available for other purposes.
The third good news about USB4 is that it does not use a new connector. We are still in the transition period from the big rectangular port, the small trapezoidal one, the big trapezoidal one and so on, to the sleek USB-C plugs that you cannot do wrong even if you try. Changing that again would be disastrous — so the connector will be the same.
Two not-so-good pieces of news, though: It will not be here for a while and it might be a little more expensive. These ports are complicated things and the ability to send more data, power and so on means it is a little harder to make. And despite the spec being published today, it will almost certainly be at least a year before any products come out that use it.
Lastly is the name. The computing hardware industry is notoriously bad at naming stuff, and USB 3 was no exception to the rule. It was always annoying trying to figure out which version of USB was supported, what that meant and so on. So from now on, USB4 is the name until they come up with USB5.
