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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

> but their info isn't always entirely accurate. For a given board I was researching with USB3.0, PCPartPicker listed it as having USB3.1Gen1 support.

This one is just USB being USB. USB 3.0's 5 Gbps Superspeed mode was renamed to USB 3.1Gen1 with the release of USB 3.1.

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Of course, now that you mention it, I can remember enough of what I read at the time to corroborate this. I actually feel a bit silly for not remembering, then I remember that I’ve been alive for every USB revision, and it’s hard to keep up with this stuff.

I’m reminded of the WiFi renumbering scheme that dropped with Wi-Fi 6, and yes, that is the way that it’s written. I never write it out hyphenated, or usually with numbers, because that’s not how most equipment with those features is labeled; only modern Wi-Fi 6 devices, and those older spec devices produced since its introduction, use the new numbering scheme, rather than 1-2 letter revision name.

Thanks for the correction, and the reminder.

The names changed out from under us. It’s hard because some people expect to see 3.0, while others expect to see 3.1gen1. Whichever one we pick we end up confusing the other side. In the end we went with the current industry naming because that’s what people will see on manufacturer spec pages and most retailers. Had our specs differed in naming between those (even if we were specifying the same thing), we’d end up getting a lot of confused people thinking our specs were wrong. We ended up doing the same rename for WiFi numbering - both those name changes went in about the same time, though I stubbornly held out as long as I felt we could...

Yes, this is why I always list specs to other humans as "USB 3.x 5/10/20/whatever gbit", just to sidestep this issue and make it obvious.

USB did it semi-stupidly by allowing 5gbit USB PHYs (which is really enough for anyone, tbf) to implement the protocol enhancements offered by newer versions of 3.x (since those are almost entirely software/firmware features).

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