Japanese PC peripheral specialist ELECOM has announced the launch of USB4 Gen2 cabling. It is the first to be certified for the new standard, which will be launched in mid-December and will allow this data transfers up to 80 Gbps.

In addition to the impressive speed, which doubles the original version of USB4, the improvement of the standard will allow other extremely interesting advantages, such as compatibility with USB Power Delivery EPR, which will allow us practically universal charging peripherals, mobiles or laptops (USB Type-C connectors) and which will support brutal power sources of up to 240 W (48 V/5 A).

Another big advantage of this standard is the support for Alternate DisplayPort mode with which we can connect computer equipment with screens in very high native resolutions, up to 8K (7680 x 4320 pixels) with a refresh rate of 60 Hz.

USB-IF, the standard’s governing body, is expected to officially launch USB4 Gen2 next December. A typical USB4 2.0 host controller will require at least one PCI-Express 5.0 x4 system bus connection to achieve the standard’s maximum bandwidth. Of course, last generation motherboards will support it.

USB4 Gen2, in progress

You already know that this USB (Universal serial bus) is the most popular port on the market for connecting peripherals and devices. The last version of the USB4 standard was approved in 2019, but only this year it began to be generally deployed in new generations of laptops, mobile phones or storage devices. Its differences and improvements compared to USB 3 are striking.

Although the general standard already excelled by doubling the base bandwidth to 40 Gb/s, it was also the first converged with Intel Thunderboltonce he opened the specs and shared them with USB Promoter Group so that manufacturers can use it without paying royalties, a second generation has recently been approved, which concerns us in this entry.

USB4 2.0 goes one step further, in this case in performance, as it doubles data transfer performance again up to 80 Gbps equal to the fastest to date, Intel Thunderbolt 4, and with improvements listed in all parts. The new standard will be backward compatible with the initial version of USB4 and also with previous versions such as USB 3.2 and USB 2.0, although we will need specific hardware and cabling to achieve maximum performance.