According to yesterday's press release from Intel, its "Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB" is now available." Industry rumors indicate that we should be seeing USB 3.0 demonstrations at next week’s IDF in San Francisco.
USB 3.0's software and hardware interface, (xHCI), will give manufacturers and developers the opportunity to prepare their current USB devices and computers for the 3.0-transition. The new interface will conveniently retain the same architecture as USB 2.0, making the ports backward compatible. Delivering 10 times the bandwidth of its predecessor, USB 3.0 will achieve speeds of up to 4.8 Gb/s, which translates to 600 megabytes per second. Given the increasing size of data files and storage devices consumers and professionals are dealing with today, USB 3.0 is being released at a crucial time because Intel directly competes with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and their FireWire technology. Two weeks ago, the IEEE said that it has approved the IEEE 1394-2008 specification, which increases the interface bandwidth of IEEE1394, also known as Firewire and i.Link, to 3.2 Gb/s. The speed boost to FireWire is anticipated to be released at the end of this year. Commercial USB 3.0 products are not expected to be released until late 2009.

In an official statement from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), "The Future" of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth intensive," said Phil Eisler, AMD corporate vice president and general manager of the Chipset Business Unit. "Lifestyles filled with HD media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification."