Intel's partners in xHCI certainly seem to think so. It is thus expected that what is now called the xHCI, or 'Extensible Host Controller Interface,' will be the de facto standard for USB 3.0 controllers. Microsoft designed its USB controller driver for Windows around the WHCI, and its USB 2.0 driver around the EHCI. With the Intel WHCI USB controller firmly entrenched, adoption of the successor EHCI controller for USB 2.0 was near total. It saved them the cost of designing their own, and assured them of the best possible compatibility. They assumed the rather significant financial burden of designing a fast, reliable host controller, and released its specification to the world under a royalty-free license.Ĭhipset and add-on card vendors were eager to use the new controller. Users and vendors familiar with Firewire's chipset-device incompatibility woes were eager to avoid this problem, and in the early days of USB, Intel stepped in. On a practical level, however, this could cause problems with incompatibilities if even minor differences existed. The USB specification describes, in theory, a protocol for which a multitude of separate but compatible controllers could be designed. The USB 3.0 spec was announced and finalized a while ago, but no devices have yet appeared, in anticipation of Intel's controller specification. Intel today announced its long-awaited xHCI open USB 3.0 host controller standard, which will likely be adopted by the vast majority of motherboard chipset and add-on card vendors. USB 3.0, and its attendant 4.8Gbps 'Super Speed' data transfers, just took a big step closer to users' computers and hard disks.

Via usb extensible host controller xbox