OT: USB 3.0

Interesting article:
According to official specifications, USB 3.0 will officially be known as SuperSpeed USB and carry with it a whopping bandwidth of 5 Gbps, which is roughly 1 CD’s worth of data (650 MB) per second. At this point, no hard drive that’s solid or otherwise can write or read at this rate, but it will certainly leave room for expansion. Some reports have indicated that SuperSpeed USB will operate at 4.8 Gbps, but the official specification calls for 5.0 Gbps.

The drawback with the USB standard is that it’s a host-based technology. This means that data transfer relies heavily on the host CPU to do all the processing. This is why we don’t see USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) exceed more than 50-percent of its total bandwidth — FireWire on the other hand comes a lot closer to its maximum bandwidth capacity. Because SuperSpeed USB is based on the same standards as USB 2.0, we can expect to see the same bandwidth drawbacks.

The new SuperSpeed USB will also be backwards compatible with older USB hardware, but you will still be required to use fully compliant SuperSpeed USB devices to achieve the highest throughput. Connectors will also be completely different, with the new SuperSpeed USB connector having more pin-outs and a different form factor — although we can expect new devices to contain both the old and new form factor.

A disappointing turn of events, recently... to me, at least.
FW, I fear, is on the verge of becoming a legacy protocol, even with FW1600 on the horizon.
Companies, including Apple, are starting to lose interest in favor of yet another simpler, but technologically inferior (IMHO), winner.

If only FW had been easier to code for, I think it would have stuck around.
Sad for us, IMO. I vastly prefer FW interfaces.

- zevo

ORIGINAL: ohhey

ORIGINAL: inmazevo

A disappointing turn of events, recently... to me, at least.
FW, I fear, is on the verge of becoming a legacy protocol, even with FW1600 on the horizon.
Companies, including Apple, are starting to lose interest in favor of yet another simpler, but technologically inferior (IMHO), winner.

If only FW had been easier to code for, I think it would have stuck around.
Sad for us, IMO. I vastly prefer FW interfaces.

- zevo

Firewire did the job of taking load off the CPU when we needed it to. However, with multi-core CPUs common now USB might be OK for future development.

As for firewire, there is no risk of it going away. Almost all computers have some type of expansion slot on them and you will be able to get a firewire card for many years to come. You can still get RS232 and Parallel port cards right ? Think how many years those have been around.