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Firewire...being discontinued?...(edit) to USB 3.0?
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| DJ RANN |
Apple have dropped FW on some laptops.
RME are replacing at least one previous FW products with an identical USB version.
Motu are rumored to be doing the same.
...so does this mean FW is going the way of dialup modems, betamax players and walkmans? |
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| cronodevir |
| Either that or Mac made a mistake... |
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| Storyteller |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Apple have dropped FW on some laptops.
RME are replacing at least one previous FW products with an identical USB version.
Motu are rumored to be doing the same.
...so does this mean FW is going the way of dialup modems, betamax players and walkmans? |
Well the majority of the common pc users couldn't be bothered. I guess that's why.
On the other hand the benefits of firewire over usb are an easy choice for the professionals that insist on stability and performance. |
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| palm |
u stole my discovery lol.
yeah i hope that peace of technology goes to hell. Next time im going RME UC |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by spolitta
USB 3.0 |
Muthafurka!!!! You weren't kidding!!
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| palm |
atleast the cables wouldnt fall out and detone the whole place.
latency doesnt matter anyway :stongue:
on a second thought, why not just set your audiodevice up with an IP-adress and let both your computers stream the soundsignal through a GB-switch, or even better WLAN? firewall would have a whole new meaning
latency doesnt matter anyway :stongue: |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by palm
atleast the cables wouldnt fall out and detone the whole place.
latency doesnt matter anyway :stongue:
on a second thought, why not just set your audiodevice up with an IP-adress and let both your computers stream the soundsignal through a GB-switch, or even better WLAN? firewall would have a whole new meaning
latency doesnt matter anyway :stongue: |
NO!! I refuse to go back to rs232. That is such a piece of . You think you've got problems now? Try using rs232. mmmmm, 20kbps, that'll work nice with several channels of audio and midi.
Well, I spose we all use a latency of 2408 anyway so it would probably work ;)
I've done a bit more research and found very mixed signals about FW.
Some manufacturers are announcing new FW products and others are discontinuing them or changing them to USB 2.
There is no information on USB products yet.
Here is the specs of USB 3.0 - Basically looks good and is comparable in speed to PCIe, can support a larger power draw (Mamps), and requires less power (v) as a minimum for the device to function.
Features
* A new major feature is the SuperSpeed bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 5 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 500 MByte/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 400 MByte/s or more after protocol overhead.
* USB 3.0 receptacles are compatible with USB 2.0 device plugs for the respective physical form factors. However, only USB 3.0 Standard-B receptacles can accept USB 3.0 Standard-B device plugs.
* When operating in SuperSpeed mode, dual-simplex signaling occurs over 2 differential pairs separate from the non-SuperSpeed differential pair. This results in USB 3.0 cables containing 2 wires for power and ground, 2 wires for non-SuperSpeed data, and 4 wires for SuperSpeed data.
* SuperSpeed establishes a communications pipe between the host and each device, in a host-directed protocol. In contrast, USB 2.0 broadcasts packet traffic to all devices.
* USB 3.0 extends the bulk transfer type in SuperSpeed with Streams. This extension allows a host and device to create and transfer multiple streams of data through a single bulk pipe.
* New power management features include support of idle, sleep and suspend states, as well as Link-, Device-, and Function-level power management.
* The bus power spec has been increased so that a unit load is 150mA (+50% over USB 2.0). An unconfigured device can still draw only 1 unit load, but a configured device can draw up to 6 unit loads (900mA, an 80% increase over USB 2.0). Minimum device operating voltage is dropped from 4.4V to 4V.
* USB 3.0 does not define cable assembly lengths, except that it can be of any length as long as it meets all the requirements defined in the specification. However, electronicdesign.com estimates cables will be limited to 3 m at SuperSpeed.
* Technology is similar to a single channel (1x) of PCI Express 2.0 (5-Gbit/s). It uses 8B10B encoding, linear feedback shift register (LFSR) scrambling for data, spread spectrum. It forces receivers to use low frequency periodic signaling (LFPS), dynamic equalization, and training sequences to ensure fast signal locking.
Availability
Consumer products are expected to become available in 2010.[37] Commercial controllers are expected to enter into volume production no later than the first quarter of 2010.[38]
Windows 7 drivers are under development but no public releases have been made available as of April 2009. The Linux Kernel supports USB 3.0 as of version 2.6.30. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| The question is does USB3 offload its processing to the main CPU or does it have a dedicated controller chip like FW? |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
The question is does USB3 offload its processing to the main CPU or does it have a dedicated controller chip like FW? |
afaik, it's still main CPU based, especially because it supports legacy versions (1.0 and 2.0).
The basis for usb is just a serial bus, and therfore an extension of the computers data transport. FW devices are actually peer to peer devices (standalone). Technically you could connect any two FW devices and they could transfer data between them, if they had some sort of interface to tell it what to do. The same is not true for USB, and require a master to command them - they are slave/master devices.
Also, it doesn't really matter that USB uses the main CPU - USB polling is a minimal use of CPU (probably less than 1%) and as long as they build the bus support for it correctly (and it is in turn correctly implemented in win7/osx), then the system would not negatively impact the CPU. |
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| hasbone |
well, supposedly there will eventually be Firewire 1600 and 3200 to compete with USB 3.0
i have no idea when it will be here though, or even if it will ever arrive. |
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| Storyteller |
| Firewire 400 is still superior to USB 2.0 from my point of view. Purely because of the fact that each connection is capable of using the maximum available amount of bandwidth per connection. USB shares the available bandwidth across all connected devices. It's performance consistency is partially depending on the other devices connected on the same hub. In a sentence, firewire connections are dedicated, USB is not as soon as you connect more than 1 device. |
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