What are the new features of USB 3.1?

The first feature one will notice is the ease of plugging the USB 3.1 because of its unique design. User will not be in dilemma to which side to choose for correct plugging and second feature will be smaller size than existing USB types.

From design perspective, It's designed in superposition state. Users don't have to mind whether it is upside or downside while plugging. USB 3.1 can boost a bi-directional data transfer rate of 10 Gbps. USB 3.1 uses 128b132b encoding which reduces line encoding overhead making it more bandwidth efficient. Apart from these, many technical improvements have been done in Link layer and protocol layer of the device.

Backward compatibility wise, there seems to be no mention of how the old operating systems will be supported. For example Windows Vista and Windows 7 are still in support cycle. And windows 8 is still new. So the support for the Windows 8.1 is there. No mention about older OS, or even OS like Linux and Mac supporting this for their own backward kernel. I think we have to wait for the new updates from OS vendors for the same.

Some of the features of USB v3.1 are :

1. It has a new design. You can plugin the USB 3.1 connector from any side.

2. It is much smaller in size than the USB v3.0.

3. It supports better speed than its predecessor.