To make it less confusing they’ll be moving to the old WiFi style names. The new versions will be called, in order:

USB-A, USB-B, USB-R, USB-CZ, USB-L2, USB-S, then USB-D. To avoid confusion they’ll use the same physical port, which is now Type-C, but renamed Type-1138.

USB-D is somewhat theoretical as we’re likely to go through more renaming by then. But I digress.

It’s important to note each version of the standard supports both active (“o”) and passive (“u”) variants depending on distance.

Power levels are a simple scale of 10^nth milliwatts, expressed as a Roman numeral for readability. So I = 10mw, II = 100mw, etc.

Soon you can buy a highly advanced passive USB cable capable of delivering 10kW to your car for charging.

USB-SuX.

This kills me because USB naming is actually super straightforward.

USB3.0, USB3.1, and USB3.2 are spec revisions.

USB3.1 (and 3.2) support Gen 1 and Gen 2 physical layer/transmission modes (gen 1 is 8b/10b encoding and gen2 is 128b/132b encoding).

USB3.2 adds support for using the extra differential pair in the cables to transmit data. So now you get x1 and x2 which correspond to the number of lanes available for data transmission (akin to PCIE x1, x4, x8, and x16).

So USB3.2 gen 2 x2 is just the USB3.2 standard using 128b/132b encoding over 2 lanes.

The problem is that everyone decided to use the tech spec identifiers rather than the consumer identifiers for labeling products. If you are in engineering working on making the product which uses USB ports, then you would look for ICs that support USB3.2 gen2x2 operation but if you are selling a consumer product, you are supposed to label it as a USB3 SS+ 20Gbps port.

On consumer devices, this would be "USB4 120Gbps". Look for this when you're in the store.

If you're designing circuit boards or writing drivers, you'll need the full spec.

Assuming the new spec pushes 60Gbps over a single lane, that would be "USB 4 Gen 4x2" going by the USB spec. Two lanes (x2) at the new lane type (4), part of the new USB 4 spec. A device only capable of driving a single new fancy lane would be "USB 4 Gen 4x1".

I think it's only a matter of they renaming every model every time the standard is updated. So models come with $standard_version $standard_revision $main_model_version $minor_model_version, and there are different sets of all of those numbers that refer to the same thing.

Or maybe they have another naming schema orthogonal to that that I don't know about.