See? I knew it wasn't as simple as I thought. :-) Thanks Lee, I'll revise and post later.
Bryan On Jun 17, 2009, at 5:13 PM, Lee Larson wrote: > On Jun 17, 2009, at 4:35 PM, Bryan Forrest wrote: > >> As I understand it, USB is a serial connection, FireWire is parallel. >> Therefore... > > Ummm… They're both serial. The big difference is that USB was > originally designed for slow devices such as keyboards, so it > shuttles all the traffic through the machine's CPU. Firewire was > designed for real-time transfer of stuff like video, so it has its > own specialized processor and can drop stuff directly into RAM > without bothering the CPU. > > This difference was very relevant back when they were both new > because CPUs were a lot slower and a busy USB port could really slow > down a machine with a single processor. Nowadays, it's less of an > issue because most new machines have more than one processor and > they're a lot faster. > > Firewire still has the edge when several devices must talk to each > other because there can be several master devices on the chain at > once. > > USB has won out in the consumer marketplace not because it's > superior but because it's cheaper and had the support of Intel and > Microsoft. Sony and Apple were the biggest companies behind Firewire. > > By the way, the technical name is IEEE 1394. Apple calls it Firewire > and Sony calls it iLink. > > > > > >
