USB 3.0 could soon drive monitors, hard drives with 100W
Found on ArsTechnica on Wednesday, 10 August 2011
The next USB 3.0 specification will provide up to 100 watts of power to devices, allowing users to power some of the more demanding gadgets on their desks without additional power supplies.
Since the new spec raises USB 3.0 power input and output by two orders of magnitude, the slate of products the ports could power is much larger and includes monitors, desk lamps, and even notebook PCs.
Yeah, that's such a great idea. The average John Doe will start plugging just everything into his PC, like desktop lamps, monitors and so on. Then suddenly that PC will make a little *fwump* noise and everything is dark, because the PSU didn't handle the required power. When your average PC comes with something like a 300W PSU, then there isn't much to plug in, considering that most of that power goes into the PC itself already. So perhaps we'll see 1kW PSU's by default now, just to save one or two wall plugs. I'm so sure that's perfectly power efficient.