One focus group on the exhibit floor was devoted to USB in its various iterations. Amongst others, VIA Technologies had a booth in the enemy camp, a somewhat surprising sight considering the overall not-too-friendly relation between Intel and VIA. USB 2.0, despite still being plagued with several flaws will become a major player in the PC interconnect scheme, so much is certain. PC2PC wiring as originally introduced by MSI is now offered by third party vendors such as NetChip with their TurboCONNECT in the form of a small interface delivering as much as 20 MB/sec throughput without needing the proprietary PC2PC plug and cable. Not to be recommended as a permanent solution, this is an extremely versatile interface, especially for large file transfers between laptop and desktop or inter-laptop configurations

TurboConnect USB 2.0 Interface between two PCs.

Because of the multiple USB port support in each PC, this solution even offers the possibility to daisy chain several PCs for an improvised network.

Schematics of a daisy-chained network using TurboConnect

Serial ATA

One thing is clear, the conventional IDE / UATA ribbon cables will soon be a thing of the past and that is good. Serial ATA is pushing into the market and like other companies, Promise had their new PCI-based controller cards on display. Meanwhile, in the Technodrome, the next revision of serial ATA, that is Serial ATA2 was showcased, featuring additional goodies as command queuing and hotswap capabilities which very well could be the end of the SCSI interface for high performance drives (my pictures came out somewhat blurred and I am not going to show them, sorry)

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