Learn and learn and learn. I like the IEEE part I can pronounce it
with gusto!
Marta
On Jun 17, 2009, at 17:13 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.
