Asus

ASUSTeK Computer Inc. (traditional Chinese: 華碩電腦股份有限公司; simplified Chinese: 华硕电脑股份有限公司; pinyin: Huáshuò Diànnǎo Gǔfèn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), usually referred to as ASUS (/eɪˈsuːs/) or Huáshuò in Chinese (traditional Chinese: 華碩; simplified Chinese: 华硕, literally "Eminence of/by the Chinese (people)"), is a Taiwanese multinational computer hardware and electronics company headquartered in Beitou District, Taipei, Taiwan. Its products include desktops, laptops, netbooks, mobile phones, networking equipment, monitors, projectors, motherboards, graphics cards, optical storage, multimedia products, peripherals, wearables, servers, workstations, and tablet PCs.

Asus is the world's 5th-largest PC vendor by 2014 unit sales . Asus appears in BusinessWeek’s "InfoTech 100" and "Asia’s Top 10 IT Companies" rankings, and it ranked first in the IT Hardware category of the 2008 Taiwan Top 10 Global Brands survey with a total brand value of $1.3 billion.

Asus has a primary listing on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under the ticker code 2357 and a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange under a ticker code ASKD.

Motherboard

A motherboard (sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, baseboard, planar board or logic board, or colloquially, a mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) found in general purpose microcomputers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general purpose use.

Motherboard specifically refers to a PCB with expansion capability and as the name suggests, this board is often referred to as the "mother" of all components attached to it, which often include peripherals, interface cards, and daughtercards: sound cards, video cards, network cards, hard drives, or other forms of persistent storage; TV tuner cards, cards providing extra USB or FireWire slots and a variety of other custom components.

USB 3.0

USB 3.0 (renamed to USB 3.1 Gen 1 in 2015) is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. Among other improvements, USB 3.0 adds the new transfer mode SuperSpeed (SS) that can transfer data at up to 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s), which is about ten times faster than the USB 2.0 standard. USB 3.0 connectors are usually distinguished from their USB 2.0 counterparts by blue color-coding of the receptacles and plugs, and the initials SS.

A successor standard, USB 3.1 (renamed to USB 3.1 Gen 2 in 2015), was released in July 2013 with the new transfer mode SuperSpeed+ that can transfer data at up to 10 Gbit/s (1.25 GB/s, twice the rate of USB 3.0), bringing its theoretical maximum speed on par with the first version of the Thunderbolt interface.

Overview

The USB 3.0 specification is similar to USB 2.0 but with many improvements and an alternative implementation. Earlier USB concepts like endpoints and four transfer types (bulk, control, isochronous and interrupt) are preserved but the protocol and electrical interface are different. The specification defines a physically separate channel to carry USB 3.0 traffic. The changes in this specification make improvements in the following areas: