What is the minimum latency of USB 3.0

Answering my own question…

I’ve come to realise that this question kind-of misses the point of USB 3.0. Unlike 2.0, it is not a shared-bus system. Instead it uses a point-to-point link between the host and each device (I’m oversimplifying but the gist is true). With USB 2.0, the 125 us polling interval was critical to how the bus was time-division multiplexed between devices. However, because 3.0 uses point-to-point links, there is no multiplexing to be done and thus the polling interval no longer exists. As a result, the latency on packet delivery is much less than with USB 2.0.

In my experiments with a Cypress FX-3 devkit, I have found that it is easy enough to get an average round trip from Windows application to the device and back with an average latency of 30 us. I suspect that the vast majority of that time is spent in various OS delays, eg the user-space to kernel-space mode switch and the DPC latency within the driver.

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