Those who are thinking about building new cutting-edge PC this black friday, should wait it out for risk of missing on three new technologies that are coming out within one year.
1. USB 3.0
Current USB standard is USB 2.0. It was released back in 2000. The maximum speed for USB 2.0 is 480 MBits/sec.
The new USB 3.0 is going to have maximum speed of 4.8 GBits/sec. Asus and Gigabyte will have their motherboards in market early next year. NEC is introducing ~$15 addon USB 3.0 card for existing PCs
2. SATA 6.0
Current SATA is SATA3.0 OR SATA-II, which offers 300 GBits/sec. While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid State Disk drives are close to saturating the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed. Ten channels of fast flash can reach well over 500 MB/s with new ONFI drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/s would benefit the flash read speeds. As for the standard hard disks, the reads from their built-in DRAM cache will end up faster across the new interface.
GigaByte already has motherboard featuring SATA6.0. Will be available in couple months.
3. Light Peak
While USB and SATA are advancing in their fields, Intel is working on its own Light Peak technology, which make use fiber-optic technology. The base speed is 10 Gbits/sec and can be scale upt 100 GBits/sec.
With Light Peak, Intel wants to eliminate, SCSI, USB, Firewire, SATA and HDMI off this planet! According to wiki, light Peak is much faster, longer ranged, smaller, and more flexible in terms of protocol support.
In the olden days, we had many connectors, serial, parallel, PS/2 etc...
USB came and vaporized all those connectors/BUSes. But USB failed to advanced rapidly and satisfy speed demands. Hence faster BUSes emerged, like HDMI, SATA, Firewire etc...
Light peak once again tries to do the same which USB failed to do! Imagine buying a motherboard and all it has in back is 20 light peak ports and nothing else!
Light Peak is expected to arrive late next year.
