As of 2023, USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 and Gen 2x2 are not implemented on many products yet; Intel, however, starts to include them in its LGA 1200 Rocket Lake chipsets (500 series) in January 2021 and AMD in its LGA 1718 AM5 chipsets in September 2022, but Apple never provided them.

Earlier USB concepts such as endpoints and the four transfer types (bulk, control, isochronous and interrupt) are preserved but the protocol and electrical interface are different.

[10] Considering flow control, packet framing and protocol overhead, applications can expect 450 MB/s of bandwidth.

If there is lack of buffer space or data, it responds with a Not Ready (NRDY) signal to tell the host that it is not able to process the request.

The use of unicast and the limited number of multicast packets, combined with asynchronous notifications, enables links that are not actively passing packets to be put into reduced power states, which allows better power management.

Accounting for the encoding overhead, the raw data throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (400 MB/s) or more in practice.

[13] All data is sent as a stream of eight-bit (one-byte) segments that are scrambled and converted into 10-bit symbols via 8b/10b encoding; this helps prevent transmissions from generating electromagnetic interference (EMI).

[20] This move effectively opened the specification to hardware developers for implementation in future products.

[21][22] Manufacturers of USB 3.0 host controllers include, but are not limited to, Renesas Electronics, Fresco Logic, ASMedia, Etron, VIA Technologies, Texas Instruments, NEC and Nvidia.

Motherboards for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors have been seen with Asmedia and Etron host controllers as well.

On 28 October 2010, Hewlett-Packard released the HP Envy 17 3D featuring a Renesas USB 3.0 host controller several months before some of their competitors.

[22] To ensure compatibility between motherboards and peripherals, all USB-certified devices must be approved by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF).

On 5 January 2010, the USB-IF announced the first two certified USB 3.0 motherboards, one by ASUS and one by Giga-Byte Technology.

[38] These delays may be due to problems in the CMOS manufacturing process,[39] a focus to advance the Nehalem platform,[40] a wait to mature all the 3.0 connections standards (USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0) before developing a new chipset,[41][42] or a tactic by Intel to favor its new Thunderbolt interface.

Samsung Electronics announced support of USB 3.0 with its ARM-based Exynos 5 Dual platform intended for handheld devices.

Various early USB 3.0 implementations widely used the NEC/Renesas μD72020x family of host controllers,[44] which are known to require a firmware update to function properly with some devices.

[48][49][50][51] On some old (2009–2010) Ibex Peak-based motherboards, the built-in USB 3.0 chipsets are connected by default via a 2.5 GT/s PCI Express lane of the PCH, which then did not provide full PCI Express 2.0 speed (5 GT/s), so it did not provide enough bandwidth even for a single USB 3.0 port.

Early versions of such boards (e.g. the Gigabyte Technology P55A-UD4 or P55A-UD6) have a manual switch (in BIOS) that can connect the USB 3.0 chip to the processor (instead of the PCH), which did provide full-speed PCI Express 2.0 connectivity even then, but this meant using fewer PCI Express 2.0 lanes for the graphics card.

This may result in a drop in throughput or complete loss of response with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices.

[55] When manufacturers were unable to resolve the interference issues in time, some mobile devices, such as the Vivo Xplay 3S, had to drop support for USB 3.0 just before they shipped.

The GND_DRAIN pin is for drain wire termination and to control EMI and maintain signal integrity.

The new mode's logo features a caption stylized as SUPERSPEED+;[63] this refers to the updated SuperSpeedPlus protocol.

USB 3.1 specification defines the following operation modes: The nominal data rate in bytes accounts for bit-encoding overhead.

The increase in bandwidth is a result of multi-lane operation over existing wires that were intended for flip-flop capabilities of the USB-C connector.

The Enhanced SuperSpeed System encompasses both, but separated – and in parallel to the USB 2.0 implementation:[70] As with the previous version, the same considerations around encoding and raw data rates apply.

[70] In May 2018, Synopsys demonstrated the first USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 operation mode, where a Windows PC was connected to a storage device, reaching an average data rate of 1600 MB/s for reading bulk transmissions,[71][72] which is 66% of its raw throughput.

[71][72][73] In February 2019, USB-IF simplified the marketing guidelines by excluding Gen 1x2 mode and required the SuperSpeed trident logos to include maximum transfer speed.