Posted on Friday, March 19 2010 @ 19:09 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NEC announced this week
it's doubling the production of its USB 3.0 host controller chips due to heavy demand. Intel chipsets with integrated USB 3.0 support aren't expected anytime soon, but according to a report from
SemiAccurate the chip giant plans to make some extra money by introducing a USB 3.0 controller chip sometime later this year.
With that in mind, it also makes financial sense for Intel to produce a USB 3.0 controller, as prices will remain fairly high at least for the rest of this year, despite NEC’s imminent production ramp, although we’re hearing it might take a little bit longer than the company announced the other day. Even if the USB 3.0 controllers are priced at $5 each, there should be a fairly good profit to be had from manufacturing them.
On top of this it seems like USB 3.0 hasn’t reached the stage where it’s cost effective enough to implement in a chipset. Judging by the size of the NEC solution, it might just take up too much die space for Intel to want to implement it, but then again, why put something in a chipset when you can charge a hefty extra for it?
