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by Neywiny 48 days ago
This goes back to another point I've historically made which is that except for storage devices, pretty much nothing supports those speeds. I think there are some USB adapters that don't use alt mode and that can have some advantages on some hosts but usually that's a disadvantage.

USB interface chips are, as far as I've seen, a Cypress/Infineon FX3 or a bit more rare FTDI FT600/FT601. I even talked with the FTDI guys at s conference and they said nobody's asking for higher than 5gbps. Infineon just recently, after I think 10+ years, came out with 10 and 20gbps chips. But only for receive. Seems to be for cameras mainly. So surprisingly yes, video production.

But I want it for other reasons professionally. For example, if you look at the signalhound (which uses the fx3) series of products, they often cap out at 40 Msamples/sec for USB. This is a classic 5gbps limit. To compete with the big boys they need 250 MHz if not more. That's 8 gbps before protocol overhead. It doesn't help that USB is extremely dependent on host compute capability to keep throughput up but assuming your PC is up to the task, 20 gbps could interface some serious data to the real world.

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Besides storage devices, i.e. external SSDs, which are very frequently used and they need a USB port as fast as possible, the other frequent application that needs the fastest USB ports is the use of USB Ethernet interfaces.
Also eGPU. I have a tiny NUC-size system with decent internal GPU and a (physically much larger) game system with a slower CPU that idles at only a bit under twice the maximum power of the NUC. It would be handy to be able to just plug in an eGPU when needed. The power and cooling requirements of fancy GPUs are so much higher than that of CPUs that large cases designed around the CPU don't make much sense. Even the pysical stability of a large GPU in an ATX style case is not ideal.