11654 A Slashdot entry by "psychicsword" yesterday notes that:

"Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires." "The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second." This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use."

ITWire's Stephen Withers reports that "The higher speeds will be achieved by adding optical fibre to the existing copper connection, but existing devices will still work with USB 3.0 ports," and quotes Greg Hantak, vice president worldwide ASIC at Texas Instruments, commenting:"[W]e anticipate that USB 3.0 will rapidly become the de facto standard as the replacement of USB 2.0 ports in applications where higher bandwidth is valued."

And Pocket-lint's Amy-Mae Elliott observes that "If the thought of a new standard makes you feel a little nauseous, USB 3 rocks some cool stats that should make you look forward in delight to welcoming it into your gadget world. USB 3 will deliver ten times then performance of 2.0 with a 4.8GB/sec transfer rate, will be optimized for low power consumption and will be backwards compatible."

This all sounds most promising for users, but is ominous news for Apple's already half-orphaned FireWire I/O technology. While FireWire 800 is still the current desktop I/O speed champ, USB 3, if it delivers on projections, will be six times faster than FireWire 800 and 12 times faster than garden variety FireWire 400, and I've heard no scuttlebutt about a faster FireWire being developed.

[Update: When I posted this column earlier today, I said I hadn't heard anything about a faster FireWire. Well, now I'm happy to say I have. In a piece posted today, MacUser's Derik DeLong says:

"Meanwhile, Firewire hasn’t completely stagnated. The next version should support at least 3.2 Gbps and proposals for 10 Gbps are in the works. That be fast mateys (ok, a day late). Firewire has been far better about achieving and maintaining its spec speeds, meaning that we’ll have to wait and see testing before we know which one will be best for data transfer."

You can read Derik's whole article here:
http://www.macuser.com/hardware/usb_30_is_gonna_be_4_gbps_big_1.php

More info. on this at:
http://blogs.pcworld.com/digitalworld/archives/2007/09/coming_soonish.html

Speaking as a FireWire fan, this is great news. CM]

Apple came late to supporting the current USB 2 - a hardware interface standard promoted by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, NEC, and Philips as an alternative to FireWire. Apple really has largely itself to blame for the development of USB 2 as a competitor to its own FireWire technology. In the late '90s, Apple had floated a proposal to charge $1.00 per port to license the IP relating to FireWire (1394a) after previously not charging any royalty. That was considered excessive by many of the USB Core companies, and they started work on updating the USB standard that could provide data throughput rates competitive with 1394a. Eventually the 1394 IP license fee was eventually set at a more reasonable $0.25 per system, but the USB 2 project was well in motion by that time. Intel decided to incorporate USB 2.0 in their chipsets rather than supporting 1394 as well as USB, which pretty much put paid to FireWire becoming a universal standard in the Windows PC orbit.



USB was originally designed with simplicity and low cost as primary objectives, while FireWire was designed for high performance, so consequently USB 2.0 is not as satisfactory an interface as faster and easily bootable FireWire, but USB 3 sound like it's shaping up to be a whole new dimension.

Apple was finally obliged to phase-in USB 2 support on the Mac, and even the iPod was switched to primary USB 2 connectivity rather than FireWire. Beginning with 3rd generation iPods USB 2 and Firewire data transfer is supported, with a FireWire connection to charge the battery from the main adapter. Beginning with the 4th generation iPods, USB is the main data transfer interface but either both USB or Firewire can be used for charging.

One problem with USB 2 is that while the interface is nominally spec'ed at 480 Mbps, in some real world tests throughput has been more like 150 Mbps. USB 2 requires more host processing power than FireWire due to the need for the host to provide the arbitration and scheduling of transactions, and in in real world use the speed of FireWire (400) hard drives nearly always beats USB 2 hard drives, Devices marketed as Full Speed USB 2.0 may not actually be capable of the fastest speeds. "Hi-speed" USB 2 devices are advertised as "up to 480 Mb/s", but don't actually operate at that full theoretical (60 MBytes/s) data throughput rate. The maximum rate currently attainable with actual USB 2 Hi-Speed devices is reportedly about half, 30 MB/s, and many Hi-Speed USB devices typically operate at even slower speeds than that. FireWire 400 is a faster interface in real world use, with actual speeds generally running up to double that of USB 2.0, especially on Macs, whose USB 2 support implementation is less efficient than with Windows. FireWire 800 is unambiguously faster than USB 2.

But USB 3 will be a whole different story. No word yet on whether it will be easily bootable on a Mac, and if not, that might remain one advantage of FireWire for Mac users.

I have both FireWire and High Speed USB 2 external hard drives, and at this point in time I still much prefer FireWire, but that 4.8GB/sec transfer rate sounds like it will be irresistibly seductive.


Charles W. Moore

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