USB-C naming to somehow get worse with USB4 Version 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

USB-C naming to somehow get worse with USB4 Version 2.0

arstechnica.com

57 pointsthg40 comments

Can someone give a legitimate reason for this madness? I thought we were past the hell of "USB 3.1 gen 1"/"USB 3.1 gen 2".

Why is every standards body seemingly incapable of sane naming? The same thing just happened with WiFi semi-recently.

"WiFi 6": Oh thankfully we have sane naming after years of B/G/AC/AX/etc

"WiFi 6E": WTF were they thinking?

Must be the same committee who came up with the various PoE standards. 802.11af, 802.11at, 802.3bt... PoE, PoE+, PoE++...

PoE# next?

POE11. Without connector /s

POE++11 will be the most important POE update since POE++98. In fact it will feel as a completely new POE.

An organization grows to a size where decisions are made by committee, bikeshedding is rampart, and one idiot in marketing can dismiss and derail the naming suggestions of an entire engineering team.

Part of the reason is that USB isn’t one linear timeline of newer versions. There are so many optional features that you are really naming a branched tree of USB specs. But even then they seem to have done a particularly bad job.

Isn't this state of things a failure in the "universal" part of USB?

What we have now is a bunch of different types of serial busses that all happen to use one of a handful of different connectors. Even if we ignore everything but the USB-C connector, we have a bunch of different types of serial busses that all use the same connector.

I propose we ignore the current names and just go with "USB-C 40G 100W" or "USB-A 5G 10W" or whatever.

The current naming is silly and unhelpful.

Your suggestion is so sensible it hurts.

AND that we require the specs printed on every USB-C cable.

I guess at some point I'll need to buy a USB-C tester that can spit out the data/charging speed and things like if it supports TB3/4/etc.

This isn’t specific enough for some situations. Let’s say you have a “USB-C 40G 45W” port. For power, your port could supply either 15V 3A, or 20V 2.25A, or both. If I have a device that wants 45W but only supports 20V, and your port only supports 15V via PD, it’s going to fall back to 5V and you’ll get a max of 15W out of the port.

Similarly, on the data side, can your “USB-C 40G 45W” port be used to directly connect to a display via a USB-C to DisplayPort cable? Will it support Thunderbolt 4, e.g., can it connect to a TB4 dock and drive two 4K 60hz displays from a single cable?

USB is a mess. Your suggestion is admirable, but given what the spec already supports, I don’t think there’s a way to convey all the info that should be conveyed in a short, easy to remember way.

I would say that you can't use the simplified cable markings unless your cable supports the full set of features implied by the marking - if your cable says "20G", it must support 4k60 * 1. If it says "40G", it must support 4k60 * 2. "100w" -> must support all USB-PD volt*amp combos <= 100W.

Would require compliance testing beyond what is currently done for cables, but would also remove ambiguity for the user.

Yeah, if we could totally re-do everything, something like this would be ideal. But the problem is, under the current spec it’s possible, and quite common (at least on the PC side of things) to have a 20gbps USB-C port that doesn’t support displays at all.

I’m not giving Apple a pass here either; the product info pages for all of the M1 (non-Pro) Macs all make reference to “Thunderbolt / USB 4” ports, which is imprecise at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.

I think they're suggesting a few suffixes: -

USB40.100W - USB only, 40G, 100W PD

USB20H.100W - USB with HDMI alternate mode and 100W PD (HDMI alternate mode exists in theory only at present though)

USB40T.60W - USB with thunderbolt alternate mode

USB40DT.40W - both thunderbolt and displayport alternate modes supported

USB40DHMTV.60W - USB with all alternate modes (so far: displayport, HDMI, MHL, Thunderbolt, VirtualLink).

Being allowed to color-code cables would be nice too. The USB-C spec forbids that IIRC.

Edit: imagine if the USB consortium had authority in the 1900s - 1920s. "Let's have mains power, phones, and radio antennas all use the same connector!"

The poster didn't suggest suffixes like this. I took their point to be the opposite: let's have short, easy-to-read, meaningful names for each possible combination of port.

But regardless, this is what I was getting at when I said "I don’t think there’s a way to convey all the info that should be conveyed in a short, easy to remember way." The spec is far too overloaded with functionality to have any kind of naming system that is both sane and unambiguous.

For example, USB40DHMTV.60W (rolls right off the tongue!) doesn't specify what PD voltages are supported, or whether the "T" component is Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4.

why are we stopping at USB4 + xx? why not do USB4, USB5, USB6, USB7...USBn?

each version is an exact spec so we could go to like USB500 and the cables would still be different because it could be like a SKU?

OK let’s say we do that. For the sake of argument, let’s define USB14 as what we call “Thunderbolt 4” today (basically USB4 plus a few extra things that are optional under the USB4 spec), with 100W of PD. And let’s define USB63 as plain old USB 3.1, at 10gbps with no alternate modes, with 30W of PD.

I buy my mom (who is not technically savvy) a computer with 2 USB14 ports and 2 USB63 ports. She wants to buy a cable that will charge her USB34 (yet another version of USB corresponding to USB-C at 2.0 speeds with no PD) headphones. How does she know what cable to buy, and what port to plug it into?

If you think about this some more, you might agree with me that it’s likely worse than the current naming scheme.

why should the ports be different? why not standardize the ports? even then, we have color coding on USB 3, why not take that further? like USB14 has RED on both USB port and cable end, different for USB 63?

in the example, the USB63 port would have USB63 written on the top of port itself so user, even a non-technical user can go to the market and find USB63 cable.....

edit: like a TV can have USB65 port and the documentation states it would support cables USB40-66 so you could go and buy any of them. the documentation would list, USB41 only does 4K 60, USB44 4K 120, USB50 8K 60, USB51 8K 60x2.

on the device side, your laptop would tell you, "your laptop support cables USB 50-60 so you can decide to NOT buy any cable from USB40-49 because your laptop wont support it but your TV can so if you wanted them to work together, not buy them....

Again, this sounds like a nightmare and more confusing than the current naming scheme.

I agree that in theory the USB working group should just standardize the ports, but if they’re doing that right, there’s no need for 500 different versions at all. Just mandate that for your device/port/cable to be called USB4, it must support all alternate modes, all PD voltages, etc.

i am not sure if that is a good idea. why should a headphone support 100w and thunderbolt?

It wouldn’t. It could support USB 3 or some lower standard. But the key is that under a redesigned versioning scheme, every new standard is fully backward compatible with the old, with no optional bits tacked on. This makes it easy to understand for an end user (“okay, my headphones have USB3, and my computer and cables are USB4, so I know it will work fine.”)

What about something like this for connector/port labelling:

  `USB-<connector> <protocol>.<speed>.<max_voltage>.<max_amperage>`

Either with 1-1 mapping of "version" numbers to values, or just "revision" numbers which would need to be translated.

E.g.

  * `USB-C 3.20.15.3` for 20Gbps (although this doesn't tell you how many layers, and what encoding), 15V, 3A or `USB-C 3.5.4.1` where the `.5` maps to the data transfer speed of 20Gbps over 2 lanes with 128b/132b encoding, the `.4` maps to max voltage of, say, 20V, and the `.1` maps to 2.25A (this way you don't have to deal with fractional amperages)

Slap an `x` anywhere that the spec isn't fully utilized, e.g., for a charging cable, the `speed` would be `x`, so the label would read `USB-C 3.x.4.2` or whatever.

There are still holes in this scheme which would require more fields and/or just leaving data out. Ports/cables can support multiple (but not necessarily all!) voltages for PD. This scheme as written doesn’t capture Thunderbolt compatibility at all, or alternate modes for DisplayPort.

My point is, while it’s certainly possible to come up with an unwieldy naming scheme that covers everything, given the current state of what USB supports, it’s not possible to have a scheme that’s simple and unambiguous. Major changes would be required to the protocol/certification requirements to make that happen.

In my search for a “universal USB C” cable I have found.

- you have to make sure they support the wattage requirements you need.

- you have to make sure it isn’t power only and supports data.

- you have to make sure it supports the data speed you need

- you have to make sure it supports video over USB C - I have a portable USB C monitor.

I was hoping you also found an actual cable--as opposed to a number of lessons ;P--but maybe that us too much to ask for :(.

I did

- USB A/USB C on one end

- Micro USB, Lightning, and USB C on the other end

- 10Gbps data

- 100W power

- supports video over USB-C (4K 60Hz)

https://a.co/d/1q5DhV5

A cheaper not as universal alternative. But good enough to charge everything but my 16 inch MacBook Pro

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092ZT8CJ9

When can we just have three-part versions? USB 4.0.1 anyone? Right now, they're making a joke of the "Universal" in "Universal Serial Bus", unless their point is all of it can fall back to 12 Mbps.

There is simply no such a thing as one size for all but unfortunately USB-C was created for that.

Differences between all those different standards and/or variants are huge and thus doesn't really matter how you name them, it's for sure going to be messy. Making it worse, they keep adding more sh*ts to it.

I used to know all my cables on which can do what. Since USB-C, I seriously became no idea at all, they all look the same, but differences are just like heaven and hell.

They should stop backward compatibility beyond a certain point. Just converge at USB 5. Any updates should be directly to 6 or whatever.

Backwards compatibility doesn’t seem to be the issue. It’s that new devices designed today don’t and won’t support the full spec.

An ereader released today likely comes with usb 2.0 because that’s all it needs. They won’t spent the extra to give it a 40gbps chip with 10 gigabit Ethernet like the usb 4 spec defines.

If only we had a consortium of sorts naming this stuff in a sensible manner…

I’m waiting for USB-C (B)

The ongoing ability to never name anything consistently or well has to be a sick inside joke at USB-IF. This isn't entirely new. USB 3.1 Gen 2, which latter became USB 3.2 2x1, is sort of similar-ish in pattern. They're iterating & trying something new again! But I'm imagining saying something like "USB 3.2 2.0". We seem about there. Yeah that don't seem great.

Anyhow, super excited for this change. I love love love that home networking is futzing around with 2.5Gbps, but USB4+ has direct host-to-host attach at data-center speeds. The distance is way less but often people just want to plug their laptop into their NAS, and now there's amazing options built in on most computers (waiting for more NAS applicances!).

> USB4 Version 2.0 has also been updated to feature the latest versions of the DisplayPort standard and PCIe spec

Still love so much that we can tunnel all kinds of other protocols (DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, &c). Yeah, it's chaotic, but I love this chaos. Good chaos. Lots of possibilities chaos.

> Yeah, it's chaotic, but I love this chaos. Good chaos. Lots of possibilities chaos.

I disagree. Having to buy 5 cables (and return 4 of them) just to figure out which one supports the USB 4 spec correctly and doesn't have weird issues with Thunderbolt or DisplayPort is annoying. I shouldn't need to be an electrical engineer just to figure out whether it will work with a Thunderbolt hub, or deliver adequate speeds or display resolutions...

Cannot agree more. I returned 3 USB-C docks in a row. It didn't matter cheap or expensive, none worked fully as expected.

> The ongoing ability to never name anything consistently or well has to be a sick inside joke at USB-IF. This isn't entirely new. USB 3.1 Gen 2, which latter became USB 3.2 2x1, is sort of similar-ish in pattern.

It literally dates back to USB 2, when USB 1 was helpfully renamed USB 2.0 full speed (as opposed to "high speed")

I've never seen anything labeled that ever, so even if the issue technically existed it wasn't a problem in practice the way the USB 3 rebranding has been.

It was only really an issue right when USB 2 came out around 2000-2005, but it was similarly confusing at the time.

> Yeah, it's chaotic, but I love this chaos. Good chaos. Lots of possibilities chaos.

This chaos makes me very reluctant to use it at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com