Computerworld - January 23, 2012

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MOBILE & WIRELESS

USB 3.0 to Reach Smartphones, Tablets This Year

COURTESY OF IBM

SUPERCOMPUTERS

IBM’s Watson Advises at Cancer Center

IBM’S WATSON supercomputer is about o begin evaluating cancer treatment options that can be delivered to physi- cians in a matter of seconds.

IBM and WellPoint — the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s largest health plan — are essentially turning Watson into an adviser for oncologists at Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles.

Cedars-Sinai’s historical data about cancer, as well as its current clinical records, will be ingested into a version of Watson that will reside at WellPoint’s headquarters in Indianapolis. The computer will act as a repository of information about multiple types of cancer, according to IBM’s Steve Gold, the worldwide marketing director for Watson.

WellPoint will work with Cedars-Sinai phy-
sicians to design and develop applications that
will help doctors prescribe specific treatments
for patients. Some of the applications will
involve speech and imaging.

USB 3.0 ports will be found widely on smartphones and tablets within the next year or so, according to the USB standards-setting organization.

Smartphones and tablets will likely have a MicroUSB port based on USB 3.0 specifications to fit the small size of the devices, said Rahman Ismail, C TO of the USB Implementers Forum, at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month.

The ports will allow faster data transfer between mobile devices and hosts such as PCs, some of which already have USB 3.0 ports. Data transfer rates will hit around 100MB/sec., or roughly 800Mbps.

Mobile devices currently use USB 2.0 technology, which is slower. The new spec is back ward-compatible with the older version.

A transfer that takes 15 minutes today will take roughly 1 minute and 15 seconds with USB 3.0, according to Ismail. But USB 3.0 isn’t nearly as fast on mobile devices as it is on PCs, where its performance can reach 5Gbps. The higher speeds require more power than most mobile devices can muster.