IEEE approves faster Firewire

Why would anyone still bother with FireWire at this point?? Yess I'll say that IEEE1394 a or b (e.g. 400 and 800 respectfully), trance the crappy Intel standard USB! Thing is ever since Apple decided to jump that sinking ship know as the PowerPC for Intel, they [Apple] have pretty much turned the knife on IEE1394, and I'm stll upset that Apple removed the ability to use IEEE1394 on all there latest gadgetry too (read iPods),...

Michae, you're blabbering a load of shit mate. PowerPC isn't sinking, IBM still sells boatloads of them to companies who do serious database mining. Not to mention that the PS3, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 are all running PowerPC based chips.

As for firewire, it isn't dead. Film editors and film makers still utilize it big time for transferring digital video around. You'll notice that while Apple doesn't include firewire on most of its lower end products, it does include it on the upper end "pro" stuff.

The iPod doesn't ship with firewire anymore because it wasn't a standard that made it big on PCs so Apple dropped the firewire chips to make the gadgets smaller and sell more to the PC crowd, not to mention the increase in profit it brought them to no longer have an expensive chip inside of the thing.


i use and purchase products that are firewire only when possible, no USB for me. It affords me a bus powered hard drive with one cable, as well as other parts, much better for portable systems. Not to mention no memory or processor usage to boot makes such devices much quicker than USB. firewire still kicks in the devices that matter here. as for powerpc being a sinking ship, it had a slump but as far as processors go, some would say the power processor is much more advanced than any x86 chip, and it was actually a step backwards during the transition until intel got em64t right... in fact, x86 chips really aren't that great other than being so widely used...some would say.

@Michae: People "still bother" with FireWire because it's a better protocol. It's got less overhead, and it's more efficient, so it can move more data.

More-simply put: FireWire-400 (400 Mbps) has a higher data throughput than USB 2.0 (480 Mbps).

The way I always saw it, firewire is like a pipe. You turn it on and it flows, you turn it off and it stops. It's a beautiful interface, all management is taken care of by a chip (rather than having the data managed by choking your cpu cycles).

usb is inferior. but firewire charged too much for licensing. maybe they learn their lesson this time, maybe not. if they didn't, we suffer sadly. esata solves somethings, but its hardly that great and very few use it.

5 years too late. I heard the 3.2gb/s rate mentioned years ago, optical then I think. This is what Firewire B should have been, and that should have been years before.

USB3, we are promised improvements, hopefully they have made it at least as good as firewire was done. And what is this 2010 release date, I thought first preliminary hardware was coming this year?

In a recent conversation, 6 months ago, with a person, who works closely with leading German car manufacturers, told me that they are looking at standardising firewire for all in-car commutations and entertainment. You might need that kind of bandwidth sending 2 different movies to the kids in the back seat as well as your GPS, rear-view cameras ( as well as every other type of camera they can think of) without stepping on vital systems in the car such as traction control which might be using the system. People also forget that firewire is asynchronous, which is the car manufacturers’ main reason for considering it.

What?! Firewire is technically better than USB by design. It was similar with VHS and BETAMAX, and USB is clearly VHS in this case.