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USB 2.0 Spec Is Final - Up To 480 MB/s
mrbinary writes "I hadn't checked the USB website for awhile, but it seems that the USB 2.0 spec is final and the speeds are confirmed at up to 480 MB/sec. Not too bad - hardware should be available shortly and the spec is fully reverse-compatible with USB 1.1. There's a PDF document that talks about the goodies upcoming including: 'A first-ever demonstration of multiple MPEG videos being played on a ZIP drive connected to a PC via a USB 2.0 Bridge. The demonstration featured an FPGA bridge designed and manufactured by In-System Design, an I/O design and engineering firm specializing in USB bridging solutions.'" USB is actually a cool standard, but cooler on paper sometimes than in real life. Hopefully 2.0 will squeeze ideal and reality a little closer together. [Updated 4:00 GMT 22 Aug by timothy:] As reader David Bastiani points out, 480 Mb/sec sounds a lot more reasonable than 480 MB/sec. Maybe that will make it easier to make the specs meet reality;)
Intel just wants to keep USB alive to try and steal the power of 1394. But in reality, the main benefit of 1394 is not being tied to a PC host or having a hub based network. Where is this useful? In the home entertainment area, where you could hook your 1394 HDTV to a 1394 DVD player and enjoy. One cable per device, instead of the several to get video and audio. Plus it's all digital.
USB2 will be nice for the speed, but 1394 is prepairing to hop to 800Mb/s then on to 1.6Gb/s.
You just reminded me of something. USB was designed originally to get rid of serial and parallel ports and unify the connection method. In fact, it has now done the opposite. Instead of two kinds of ports on the back, you now are going to have 4 (more if you've got firewire like Sony's VAIO line), two of which (USB 1/2) look very similar. Again, Apple has the right idea, and the PC industry just doesn't "get it."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's pretty simple. Not too many computers are shipped with firewire pre-installed. Not only that, there are fewer devices for it (still more high speed SCSI devices). I like firewire, but in working with hundreds of new and used computers at work and school, I haven't encountered much firewire - it's just not popular. USB is built onto most ATX motherboards now, and has cross-platform support.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I just want to say that usb already manages to ruin most of my days at work.
I work on diagnostics for a hardware company that sells docking stations and we have a product with usb in it. Developing a software diagnostic was a pain in the ass. The protocol is so screwed up. I think its a conspiracy to up the processor speeds the average computer user needs.
The OHCI implementation (OPTI & CMD chips) causes an interrupt every millisecond. When this interrupt occurs a bunch of data is sent over the link. Lots of software driver activity. Regardless if there is a device plugged in or not watching this on a Logic Analyzer you see a bunch of data being processed that basically means "I'm ok, I'm still here". If that interrupt isn't handled properly system crash or at least USB crash. Actually using a device increases this of course but I think for a USB mouse to suck this much resources is.. bad?
UHCI (Intel) implementation is slightly better. Except no one can get it to work if its not built into motherboard (except VIA, what does that say?). Doesn't cause as many interrupts, and its IO based. Basically USB 2.0 is going to increase the frequency of interrupts. Faster processors benefit who?.. Of course I'm just being paranoid because i'm a software guy at a hardware company.
~Bryan Starbuck
I don't own any USB devices because the spec was too slow. ( I could have gotten some joysticks or MIDI instruments, but I didn't)
Now (2.0) there is some major headroom. This can be a platform to network homes. Its fast enough to have a network display device, and send images from a sat receiver or vcr to any pc or other tv.
My FreeBSD box syncs with my Visor (Palm clone) over USB. I have a working USB Ethernet (intended for use on an i-opener, or similar unit which I havn't had the time to hack up). I expect my new digital camera will as well since I got sources to a Linux program that does it. I just have to find out the diffrences between raw USB access on Linux and FreeBSD.
According to the (BSD) usb mailing list I'm on many USB modems work. As do many USB mass storage devices. Not that USB1.1 is a fast access path to mass storage, still slower then 1987's async SCSI.
I don't know how closely sync'ed the BSD and Linux USB stacks are. I think the Linux one started with NetBSD's (a fair and good idea). FreeBSD's track's NetBSD's.
I'de say more but the dog wants attention...
Firewire is not only faster than USB, it's more versatile, and more expensive. Firewire mice and keyboards just aren't very practical. Unfortunately, the 12Mb/sec bandwidth of USB 1.0 is a little slow for some peripherals such as scanners and CD-RW drives. Putting Firewire on PCs to meet this need means more ports of different types to confuse the average user. It also means additional expense of having both a USB controller and Firewire controller in the same system. With USB 2.0, the additional cost is relatively low, and it keeps things simpler for the user. Maybe Firewire will continue to increase it's bandwidth and still take off for higher end devices. So far, the only ones I see pushing it are Apple and Sony. If it's such a good general purpose bus, where's the iLink (Firewire) ports on the Playstation 2. Of course, I've never seen a Playstation 2, so for all I know it could have Firewire.
Both your AT Keyboard, and your PS/2 Mouse use an IRQ, (1 and 12), USB uses ONE IRQ for all devices attached, up to 127!
You only have 16 total, IRQ's are precious.
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
As the poster above me mentioned, will putting a usb1.x hub on one port, and a 2.0 hub on the other port solve the downspeeding problem?
Perhaps not. But they seem to be smart enough to massage the judicial/legislative systems into giving them their way.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
I see plenty of comparisons between firewire and USB, but no-one seems to be mentioning the cost of the hardware. Yes, it does appear that firewire is a faster, better protocol, which doesn't require a PC as master controller (if I read the posts below correctly) But realistically, how much is it going to cost to place this hardware on my motherboard and in my camera/hard-drive whatever?
By having a host computer do the work you can significantly reduce the complexity and the cost of the peripheral- On average, there are going to be many more peripherals than hosts. If the peripheral is cheaper, then you have an immediate leg up.
Who's going to win? Probably Intel. Even overlooking price, Intel is the 800 pound gorilla that has intimate relationships with *all* the major PC makers. Intel works heavily on building relationships with the PC makers, so that they can get more than just CPUs in PCs, but chip-sets and other peripherals. Firewire is backed by Apple. Apple doesn't doesn't command as many of the eyes or ears of the PC manufacturer world, by their own design.
The winner of this battle is going to be whoever can put the most ports on the most desktops. Think Beta vs. VHS.
on a side note, why the hell dont we give ourselves 256 IRQ's? we went from 8 to 16, but thats not enough!
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
Say, how does that work? I just noticed that my video card is IRQ 80, the USB controller is 31, SCSI 72, NIC 76.
The legal system can't stop me from wandering down to radioshack and picking up a 1M resistor and a 741 opamp.... Christ, their security scheme could be bypassed for $2.50 in parts!!!!
Try maxing USB 2.0 on ISA though, BOOM! :-)
One of the reasons I don't run Linux too much anymore is this :) I've got my share of USB devices and it's really sweet when I can just move my mouse, printer, etc. from machine to machine with no issues.
From what I understand, it still is. I think there are command queuing issues and such that are well handled by SCSI host adapters. I'm kinda fuzzy on this, so I might be wrong.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You mean like a playstation II?
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Well since you have started your own little thread I thought I might chime in with my own thoughts.
Music isnt' the be all and the end all of entertainment. Just as radio isn't even a candle to television in any sense.
Plus I am not going to take a 4 year degree to learn to decipher a speaker system and then void the warrenty on my speakers to get said sound.
It is just sheer lunacy. Perhaps you should look into things that need more protecting than just music like perhaps human rights/liberties, or perhaps free expression. I never owned a piece of sound hardware and I don't really care to start.
The principal is simple humans have far better things to do with their time than to constantly chase legaleese with a bunch of fat cats and put themselves in bad circumstances.
I want to honestly know *why* in the hell suddewntly music seems to be more important than blood, human life, or even moving pictures.
Reading a good book at a library or perhaps going to a nice play or even opera is better than getting pure music.
In short the human race should pick it's battles for the public to care about and I can't possibly see why music should be one of them. Music is all about love/lost love/getting in love and the like any way. Verry little with any political message or theme. Most is bland. Classiccal music at least tells a story and I don't need to go on napster to get a copy of that and it's not even questionable.
I want you to show me a new song (within the last 50 years) that has told some form of epic story using a rock n' roll genre as it's basis. I don't think it exists.
Now Faust: that's literature.
Respond to s
Good question. As far as getting a hub to make 1.x devices go faster, I don't see how that would be possible. The 1.x devices either aren't going to generate data fast enough (clock speed), or the actual cable/port itself won't physically allow for 2.x speeds (transmission line problem). However, isn't USB supposed to allow isosynchrony? It seems like there could be slow 1.x devices on a 2.x system, and 2.x devices could still be guaranteed 2.x-level speeds. Alas, I've no clue. Seems to me that USB's only advantage is the cables are cheaper. Firewire has smaller ports, and allows daisy-chaining sans hubs. Of course, a lot of implementation depends on the complexity of the chipset. Anyone have any info on this?
... mentioned in the article is going to be on what OS ?
think about that. moderate it down for not saying linux is god, but they still can't show a device being plugged into a USB port, detected, and a driver / module install or configuration process initiated.
and that doesn't make the OS less stable, less usable, actually it makes it very transparent, and very usable.
today i plugged the 'jumpshot' USB adpater for my nikon digital camera's Lexar memory card into my Win 2k pro box, and it asked for a driver, i pointed it to the recent download from lexar, and in a matter of seconds it all works.
i want linux to do this. linux can't do this.
so i don't use it as my major platform. i've hacked and hacked and played with my linux systems to provide music to my entire house, to run tape back up at work, to provide encrypted connections for local telnet to remote consultants..
it's great. i run it. but where's the intelligent, non-hack hardware support ? i can do it -- i just have better things to do with my time than hack my system just to USE IT.
thoughts ?
You say PCI is not dead... And this is supposed to be good news? While I admit that PCi is a big improvement over the old days of fiddling with jumpers to try to avoid interrupt conflicts, I've run into too many problems with shared interrupts to believe PCI is well-designed.
If I could stop putting expansion cards into my PCI slots and start plugging in cheap external sound, network, and disk devices, I'd be much happier. I don't care whether it's USB, FireWire, or both, just as long as I can get the peripherals I want at consumer prices and plug them in where I want them.
Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich hungrig.
Why didn't someone think of this before?
- Who has one of these cameras?
- Do you want to pay someone a %% every firewire gizmo you buy?
- People HAVE USB already.
Just my USDI want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"USB 2.0 will extend the speed of the peripheral to PC connection from 12 Mbps on USB 1.1 to up to 480 Mbps on USB 2.0 - or 40 times overexisting capabilities."
Although 320X would be nice. :-)
--Nicholas
I was just trying to point out how cheap one could do it... there are radioshacks everywhere... but how many Fry's are there?
Actually my old 200MMX had the support aswell...but I don't even own a USB device, simply because there is nothing I am really interested in on that standard. If they start coming out with hard drives and other media devices I will definately buy them, assuming they have improved the speed for data transfer to resonable levels.
We're just not really concentrating on developing it enough. It has a "whatever" kind of attitude. Which is sad, because I am going mobile in the next couple months (no desktops, only labtops and compact perpherials) and I might have to be using USB for alot of perpherials, I just hope it improves by then.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Because it won't be a CD, it will be an audio-DVD. Also, the DMCA makes any attempts to circumvent the system illegal -- even going down to Radio Shack and buying an Op-amp so that you can make a backup copy of the media or use soundbites from the disk for your default beep.
I saw someone selling external usb cases designed to receive 3.5" half-height hard drives. You could get them in different flavors: scsi, IDE... I've forgotten who makes them, though...
I guess the reason everyone is so excited about USB getting faster is that its kinda like open source software in the light that anyone can use it and develop for it without having to pay any royalties to anyone. Despite the fact that it is faster, Firewire is owned by Apple, and anyone that wants to use it has to pay a small royalty to them. This apparantly pisses off a lot of hardware manufacturers, so unless the really need the speed of Firewire (digital cameras and the like) they'll go with USB every time, especially since its supported on almost all major platforms, both hardware and software.
I for one am excited about USB 2.0, and cant wait till I am able to get scanners, printers, and webcams that support the new standard.
Two of which (USB 1/2) are identical... There is no difference in the ports.
--Rob
Proof most moderators sort by score.
This is the first post to mention a mistake in the article, yet much later posts are the ones getting modded up because their parents are higher modded.. sucky.
whereas firewire does not. i read somewhere that intel just didn't want to support a standard that didn't force people to use their products. firewire is becomming quite common(it seems) in DV equipment both PC and non PC based. intel could easily incorporate a firewire interface onto their boards they just don't want to. VIA on the other hand(last i heard) was going to start integrating firewire onto it's chipsets sometime in the near future. with VIA quickly becomming the dominant chipset maker for PCs, you'll likely find firewire on many of the PCs in the next year or so. I still like SCSI. i (personally) don't have any use for scanners digital cameras or any other of those peripherals!
I think the reason for that is the technology is changing...as soon as USB came out, another, faster technology (firewire) could already take its place.
The real problem here was that manufacturers were VERY slow to produce USB peripherals. My Asus Pentium motherboard had connectors for USB ports on it 4 years ago, but until the iMac came along last year (or was it the year before?), there was narry a USB peripheral in sight.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
This is the same company that doesn't seem able to write a USB 1.X CD-R device driver that doesn't blue screen Windows 2000.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The comment was referring to the inability of USB to act as a networking medium. USB to ethernet adapters don't use USB as the networking medium, they use ethernet.
cheers,
Matthew Reilly
Listen folks, when talking about external serial links, the speed is always given in bits/sec.
Does anyone know what became of this?
Yup.
Does the final USB2 spec contain any such anti-consumer features?
Nope.
But such "features" wouldn't be implemented at that level anyway. If people are going to implement those kind of things they'll do it at the class driver level. I do not follow the audio class working group, so I can't say what's been proposed there.
--Rob
It's not the purchase of the copyrighted material that I happen to object to.  If you were able to look at my CD/Video/DVD/software collection you would know this.
What *I* personally object to is only being able to play authorized media on authorized players.  Then the record/movie/software companies will control what I watch and how I watch it.
No thanks.
Metallica, One (...And Justice For All)
;)
If I had the time, I'd compile a list of 30 songs, but since you asked for just one (oh, haha, I'm so funny) there it is.
-----
Doesn't firewire allow two devices on the chain to talk to each other directly, without needing the CPU? If this is the case, you could have (say) a FW video camera dump its contents to a FW HDD at the full 400MB/s without requiring CPU intervention.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Is that megabit or megabyte?
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
Maybe that's true if you're using PIO modes, but modern IDE uses DMA transfers, so the processor cycle issue really isn't so much any more.
On the other hand, USB is explicitly designed as a computer peripheral bus the root node must always be a computer. Without a computer powered on and managing the Universal Serial Bus, it's useless.
You say that like it's a bad thing. As you say USB is intended as a peripheral bus. You can right now replace a most of the ports on a desktop machine with USB and be done with it.
On the other hand, you'll never put a mouse or joystick on a 1394 network. The HW would be far to expensive, the heavy shielding the cables require would makes a mouse tough to move, and you run into the same problem the wireless peripheral guys have of "which host does this keyboard belong too".
I think what happened here is manufactures want to make consumer level devices that require a little to much bandwidth for USB. Video cameras and the like. Unfortunately the cost of 1394 HW is high enough that if they were to try to do it right then they've priced their device outside consumer levels. What happened is that people made crap devices that worked over USB, but were cheap and easy enough to sell mass market.
USB 2.0 is an attempt to address that by adding enough speed to support the higher bandwidth devices on the existing bus. Yes it's still based around a host, and yes it can't do everything 1394 can. It's not supposed to. 1394 is definitely the choice for networking your AV equipment. USB is definetly the choice for keyboards and mice. 2.0 makes it reasonable to manufacture in between devices for either bus.
--Rob
>Intel has supported 1394 for years
How so? I haven't seen anything from them in the way of support in their chipsets. NOTHING.
>1394 will never be cheap enough for a mouse
It was never _intended_ to be for mice or such things!
USB & FireWire were to be complimentary, only Intel apparently wants to muscle in on FireWire's territory by upping the USB speeds to make it seem like speed is the only advantage FireWire has over USB, which is not the case. They realize that, that's why they're also backing Serial-ATA for things that they realize aren't going to work with USB 2.x (same things that don't work well with USB 1.x).
FireWire is already here, and FireWire devices are already here. The chicken and egg problem of FireWire has been solved - Intel just needs to bite the bullet and put support in their chipsets. As do AMD, VIA, SiS, and ALi.
Whilst on the subject of biting bullets, Intel also needs to bite the RAMBUS bullet - just pay off Rambus and go to DDR full-steam. Ugh.
And AMD needs to stop smoking whatever it is they're smoking and realize that VIA is not up to the task of producing a stable and high-end Athlon chipset, much less a dual-proc one, and make the 760MP chipset in volume. With AMD, you truly CAN afford a two processor system!
It's only a factor of eight, I know. Call me picky. That's the difference between a bit and a byte.
I can just feel the faster response from my mouse already.
Unfortunately, Intel then had to cripple it with a CRC of only 16 bits. This is feeble, but what makes it really bad is that the protocol relies on occasional "jams" -- i.e., deliberately corrupted packets. A 16-bit CRC is just not enough when jams are part of the protocol! (Ethernet uses 48 bits.)
Even USB 2 uses only 16-bit CRCs. Ugh.
I for one hope they don't finish off isa untill some one manages to make a pci modem that works.
.02 (give or take inflation)
I've put quite a few win-'modems' into systems and unlesss your in that magic range that lets v.90 work (and not behind more than one a-d conversion) your lucky to get >14.4.
Plus linux support for anything other than a real modem is crappy at best (I wouldn't wanna write those drivers eigther).
That said a LOT of the aspects of the pci bus and current pc architecture are long overdue for improvement. preferably somthing a lot more open ended with lots of future expansion potential.
I was thinking that it is time to actually go backwards in a sense. Once apon a time each expansion slot in many computers (the apples for example) was a unique identity. by doing this with irq's and i/o space assigned to each slot and have drivers written so they don't depend on any particular io/irq combination, and of course the hardware just see An irq line and an address region.
just my
Mycroft
The poster got it wrong, that's 480Mbits/sec. To put this is perspective, 1394 firewire tops out at 400Mbits/sec. So this is marginally better.
As gross as some technical details may be, USB 2.0 isn't such a bad idea. They are aiming at making hardware costs cheap for devices.
As for bringing down your bus speed by using 1.1 low/medium speed devices, that's not a problem. The spec is setup to use a store and forward mechanism within 2.0 compliant hubs so that the bus speed was not lowered globally just to talk to old 1.1 speed devices. (this means you talk at full speed to the hub, which acts as a switch between the fast bus and the lower speed devices).
USB 2.0 vs Firewire is an EIDE/ATAPI vs SCSI debate. Wait and see what devices and controllers are cheap and ubquitous, those will "win" in the consumer market.
2.0 compliant hubs will be more expensive due to the logic, but mass produced common silicon is cheap.
Uh...480 Megabytes per second? I guess we can scrap all these fibrechannel arrays right?
Obviously you're not familiar with Last Kiss or Teen Angel or that song about the kid who entered a race trying to win enough money to buy his gal a ring but got killed instead.
Classics, all of 'em. One listen and you'll be straining through your tears to see the monitor as you write your retraction.
11*43+456^2
Wow, this is really great news. I mean, yeah, Firewire already exists, runs at the same speeds, and has a good number of existing devices that use it, but that's not important. I mean, who could take any standard that Apple helped author seriously? They make candy-coloured computers, for christ's sakes! Obviously Intel have worked long and hard to develop this new standard, and everyone knows that Intel kicks ass! Yeah! Take that Apple! That's what you get for trying to charge a fifty-five cent "licensing fee" for using your silly FireWire technology! And of course FireWire 2 is coming out soon, with speeds that make USB 2.0 look like the original USB spec, but I'm sure Intel will have a USB 3.0 spec out by the end of 2002. You can count on it!
I read somewhere about a plan for using FireWire technology to replace some parts of the internal PCI bus to get rid of the internal bottleneck. Personally, I think that PCI should some day (soon) go the way of ISA. (On a side note, I wish that ISA really would go away. It's time is through.) I really see the need for a faster internal bus. Maybe firewire is the way to go, or maybe not. Something needs to be done, though. As for the outside, I really like USB, because of its utility. The idea that I can use the printer that came with my friend's iMac on my HP laptop is very refreshing. Maybe with USB at higher speeds, we'd have something on the outside that could take advantage of that speed boost, aside from just internal stuff like those gigabit ethernet cards that most of us don't have the hardware to really take advantage of.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Yeah so just because you want to do beowulf clustering ( a technique that is not 100% documented for the average person to use and apply) you want to change the interfaces that people have used for years so that I can have YAAUU (Yet Again Another Unneecewssary Upgrade). I would estimate that the number of people who need to link 10,000 computers to do nuclear weapons simulations for another bad quake game don't need this or anything similar. In fact I would hazard a guess it's just a tactic to eliminate people from fully partaking in the PC experience fully. Really bad form. Why don't these guys actually design a spec that is tapped up the wazoo the first time that will work for say the next 20 years without needing to be upgraded. Whatever happened to keep uptil it breaks manufacturing techniques. Hell cars were built tougher back in older times (I know after owning 3 cars and having my Chevrolet Chevette Scooter 1981 last longer than any of them the rest being a 1985 Crysler Plymouth Reliant and a 1992 Ford Tarus Station Wagon).
Respond to s
From what I've heard, Serial ATA is just ATA/100 with cheaper cables. It's still only 2 drives per bus, still internal-only, still no hot-plug, etc. For cheap internal drives, Serial ATA will be great. For everything else, there's FireWire.
I don't have scanners, video editing suites, etc., etc.. So as far as I'm concerned, USB was just another way to hook up my keyboard and mouse.
But-- surprise! Even my mouse performs like crap over USB. Ask anyone who plays a mouse-intensive game like Quake or UT. Or try it for yourself. Plug the mouse into your PS2 port, play a bit. Then plug it into your USB port, play a bit. Seem a little less responsive? A LOT less responsive? Completely miss your 180 degree turns?
Anyways, does USB2 fix this? Is this a latency issue? I don't care about bandwidth-- my mouse doesn't really suck up that much. So does USB2 add anything except bandwidth?
The thing with USB 2.0 is that Intel, the major PC manufacturers and the existing USB peripheral manufacturers are backing it. That's an awful lot of marketing $$$s and a lot of development $$$s already tied up in the standard. What this means is that USB 2.0 is going to be a lot more successful in the non-professional world than predicted.
Take a look at USB 1: Even after Microsoft's completely hashed up support for it in Win95, it's already reached a point where a wide range of devices are available: They're cheap, easy to use and do the job. Everything that was promised.
Where did it go wrong? OS support! Now, Windows2000 finally gives us a Windows OS where USB really works, Linux is getting there and even Apple (the fathers of FireWire) have excellent support for it (better than Windows IMHO). This is the right environment for USB 2.0 to actually make USB useful by making it fast enough.
For those of us that prefer FireWire, I feel sure that some enterprising company will develop a USB 2.0 to FireWire converter and just because USB 2.0 appears doesn't mean all those 1394 PCI cards will disappear!
The use of firewire clearly has a lead on USB 2. I like USB for what
it does now (modems/mice/"slower" serial comm). I like FireWire for
what if does now (CD-RW/DV/Hard Drive/"Fast" comm). Every day more
FireWire products are coming out and being baught in this "Fast" comm
arena. The serious players from manufacturers (Apple/Sony) to
professionals and power users know that they can go out and buy stuff
that is already better than USB 2.0 today. I just don't see any
reason to continue down the road of something that is already too late
to market.
---gralem
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I think the reason for that is the technology is changing...as soon as USB came out, another, faster technology (firewire) could already take its place.
Uh, dude, get your history straight. Firewire was out in late 1980s. USB 1.0 sucked bad. Until I see some usb 2.0 devices where things worked properly, I'm going to say that it'll suck too. Implementation is very different from theory.
The real problem here was that manufacturers were VERY slow to produce USB peripherals. My Asus Pentium motherboard had connectors for USB ports on it 4 years ago, but until the iMac came along last year (or was it the year before?), there was narry a USB peripheral in sight.
Isn't it funny how Apple remains the driving force eventhough they sidelined themselves years ago? Before the macs, there was no CDRom drives. Before the Macs, there weren't any mice. Before the mac, there was no gui. Before the mac, there were no...
And yes, I know all these existed before the macs, but it was never popular until macs started spouting them
-the b0fh
None of my claims was shot down :) I never said the trademark cost money.
Was simply way too much FUD being spread on this thread. Noone took the trouble to read the USB 2.0 spec and the adopters agreement... simple facts were that patent licensing for USB 2.0 is free and it isnt for Firewire, and speed mixing does not lower the overall throughput.
"You're not going to convince anyone that USB 2.0 isn't a joke compared to 1394."
I wasnt trying to, I was stating mere fact and pointing out FUD. Frankly the eagerness with which people try make clearly false assumptions to proove USB 2.0's inferiority only makes me doubt the validity of the arguments they do seem to back up a little better.
I havent got the background to make technical assesment's on either, but I can read unlike some people here apperently.
USB uses a microcontroller architecture, not a digital signal processor.
http://www.cypress.com/usb/fx2factsheet.pdf
also, intel sold their usb chip division some time ago.
jim
The USB hype is in no way an indicator of it's performance. USB is far more complex than firewire, and more importantly to Intel's bottom line USB requires a host PC.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
Here is an excellent article outlining the fundamental problems with USB's design. Be fire to read the follow up article at the bottom:
http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB2.html
---
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
USB wasn't meant at all to originally be used for those kinds of things. It was meant to be a simple replacement for old PS/2 and serial ports. It was good that USB was kept lightweight. It made putting USB controllers on machines a lot cheaper.
I don't see what advantages you tout about USB aren't possessed by Firewire. Firewire devices are hotswapable, and are connected in equally shared long chains -- and Firewire doesn't have the hideous resource sharing issues of USB and USB2.
You see, USB and USB2 are both processor-arbitrated bus schemes. This is yet another insidious move by Intel to keep people dependent on buying faster and faster CPUs, whereas Firewire allows the devices to negotiate intelligently for bandwidth usage. Furthermore, USB2 requires far more intelligent balancing of devices on the chain than before -- eliminating one of the primary USB advantages, simplicity.
The problem is that all USB/USB2 devices get an equal chunk of time. This means that if you have a keyboard, a mouse, a scanner, and a digital camera on the same chain, each one gets 1/4 of the 480 Mb/sec bandwidth. Your keyboard may only need the low-end 1.5 Mb/sec rate, but it gets a full 120 Mb/sec. This means that you have to learn to keep your high-end devices off of the same chain as your low-end devices, or you have to get used to unplugging things when a specific device needs the bandwidth. This also ignores the complexities of USB/USB2's star topology.
With Firewire, it's plug-and-play -- at the expense of more complex driver and hardware controllers. Firewire can even guarantee a dedicated minimum amount of bandwidth. USB2 is an insidious marketing ploy by Intel to destroy Firewire. Since Intel is making it, ignoring the fact that it'll be years since its initial announcment before we see products while Firewire is here and now, it's "inevitable" that it'll replace Firewire. This is a blatant powerplay at the expense of consumers to attempt to make people more reliant on faster Intel chips. It should not be celebrated for "Finally" getting closer to achieving its goal. I hope USB2 dies a flaming death.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I guess I don't have to post my picks now!! :)
The license fee that goes to Apple everytime one buys a Firewire product is on average about US17c, even on really expensive products the Gross fee paid to Apple is still less than US50c. Aparently when Firewire first came out Apple wanted a net return of US$1 in license fees for every Firewire product made. But Just about every Electronics company kicked up a stink, so Apple backed down. I read all this in an article in my morning paper's IT section, so it must be right:).
Firewire never really got over the 1$ a port fiasco, the relatively sane licensing terms were too little too late apparently.
"Mixing USB 1.X and 2.0 devices will not work well, the USB 1.X devices drag the average bus speed way down."
Why is this so? Shouldnt the hub isolate the USB 1.X devices and translate their communication to high speed USB 2.0?
It's already almost physically impossible to max out the bandwidth of a mouse to the extent that it fills the entire pipe. Usually mouse responsiveness needs to be toned *down* because humans don't need anything that fast.
Respond to s
That works for me most of the time. Just wait until it's done. Not everything that takes more than .0001 nanoseconds is "fucking slow".
Respond to s
Sorry for the comment but I don't have access to a pdf viewer in the least. Assuming that this is just a mere speed increase and if not that a slight change in the specification than it would be trivial to write the drivers for the various OSs because most of the code is already prewritten and dosn't have to be redone at all.
Respond to s
Now that such speeds have been reached and they can be implemented, company's should start developing networking technolgies to take advantage of the incredable speeds that usb 2.0 can achieve. Who wouldn't mind having 480 mbits/s of bandwith to dispose of?? Dvd movies could be streamed from a server to other machines on the network, the possibilities are endless. Just giving a heads up to all the R&D people, i'll be looking for USB 2.0 networking.
Cheers,
Take a look at this little article on USB 2.0 and this one.
I can say that firewire is here and it works now, beautifully. Why should I wait for manufacturers to develop and implement USB 2.0 mobos and devices? For a measly extra 80Mb/s? I'll wait for firewire to go to 800Mb/s later this year.
What? No firewire devices besides camcorders? My favorite firewire devices are the sancube and this portable firewire raid array.
Now they (hard drive manufacturers in particular) just need to make some native firewire devices, bridges are just so... inelegant.
What would it take to get a 486 to use USB? Otherwise I really don't much care and unless it costs less than a standard hard drive I don't care.
Respond to s
excerpt from http://www.electronicnews.com/issue/RegisteredIssu es/2000/05152000/z54f-1.asp
Cost effectiveness. Cost is very difficult to compare, because a number of variables can influence the final cost of the product. Another I/O standard, 1394 (FireWire), achieves similar speeds to USB 2.0 and thus is a good model for comparison. The most widely accepted comparison standard is the use of gate counts to provide an apples-to-apples comparison. Vendors who supply USB 2.0 and 1394 solutions estimate that 1394 host controllers have two to three times more gates than do USB 2.0 controllers. Vendors also estimate that 1394 peripheral controllers have four to five times more gates than comparable USB 2.0 peripheral silicon. With Intel planning to integrate USB 2.0 host controllers into future chipsets, the system costs of implementing USB 2.0 will be incremental vs. the cost of adding a discrete host controller for something like 1394.
cheers,
jim
Does anyone know, will we have to buy new motherboards or will there be PCI cards with USB 2.0 that would work on todays motherboards?
I think you're missing the point here. Music is about the melody, rhythm, and... well... music! Think classical, or something like Pink Floyd. Lyrics are nice, but they are only secondary. If you want good lyrics, read poetry. A lot of the music I listen to doesn't even have any words. But if you want an example of something with good lyrics, try a Pink Floyd album or two (just an example.)
In short... You should go out there and experience something besides pop. (Pop, in this case, meaning anything made within the last 10 years that is played on MTV.)
--
if there are no per port fees then what is it that companies are bitching (a flat fee, per computer, possibly). from what i understand apple gets something monetarily when you decide to include it in your computer. if its free then why would intel care about creating USB 2 someone else funded all R&D for something as good as or better than USB 2
"For example, we got a USB burner at work, and we tried to hook it up to a Mac running the latest MacOS. Guess what, to be able to use it, you have to reboot with all extensions turned off, EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO USE IT. "
That's true in my experience. The driver is crappy. Luckily, Mac OS allows for many different os configs. I have a different extension set for cd burning than for regular use(plus, another set for game playing). Until they make a better driver for the burner, that's how it's going to have to be.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Mixing USB 1.X and 2.0 devices will not work well.
Instead of "Plug 'n Play", novice users are just going to get stuck at the "plug" part.
Calls to tech support because the video camera they just bought seems "slow",
It could have been so simple, but now it's a mess for clueless users. Just wait til USB3.0.
Not in SQL*Plus, fuckhead.
Just because you use sed, doesn't mean shit.
--
USB provides isochronous, bulk, interrupt, and control transfers. Isochrony is necessary for things like USB microphones and speakers - they HAVE to have a constant deivery rate to ensure no signal distortion occurs.
Coincidentally, it turns out that USB chipsets ARE easier to implement - that seems to be the only advantage of USB over Firewire.
TLTIC, Linux and BSD do support it. In fact, NetBSD supports my USB Zip 100 out of the box. It takes a later kernel version to make Linux do it, though. But it did work, with a little hacking.
If violence isn't solving your problems, you're not using enough of it. - MAJ Misato Katsuragi
Remembering Moore's Law, that computer speeds will double every 18 months, should we be impressed by this 20% improvement over IEEE 1394(Apple's FireWire)? No! It's ironic, the only reason anyone uses USB is that Apple made a line of computers that required it. I can't imagine they'll make the same mistake twice.
My other sig is extremely clever...
The actual transceiver design may have been borrowed from FireWire, but what really makes a standard is the support infrastructure around it such as the device framework and drivers, not the low-level electronics.
Intel has supported USB on its chipsets for a long time before Microsoft had any kind of software support for it in Windows 95 OSR/2. It took more than a year until they released Windows 98 with halfway decent USB support and ironed out most of the remaining bugs in hot plug'n'play and other parts of the system with Windows 98 Second Edition. Overall it took more than 3 years.
Do you want to wait this long until Microsoft gets it right with 1394?
USB 2.0 will leverage this miserable experience and make sure that we don't have to go through this again. It will just replace the low level host controller driver and use all the upper layers without modification.
Personally, I don't care much for Windows, but the peripherals will not be on the shelves for us Linux geeks until they are supported by Windows.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"..or that song about the kid who entered a race trying to win enough money to buy his gal a ring but got killed instead."
And this has nothing to do with love/lost love, as the previous poster argued about?
I on the other hand thought the comment was well put forth. We shouldn't be fighting to get what the music/movie industry makes "for us". We act pretty much like small cubs fighting among themselves to get milk from their mother. Instead, we should live our own lives and ignore people trying to control us into living in Barbie world.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
True, and even 64/66 PCI (528 MB/s) would be maxing out trying to keep up with a fast firewire streem at 3200 Mb/s (of course, try finding a device or system that could utilize 3200 Mb/s anyway). However, one of the things that Apple has done (or at the very least has talked about), I believe, is to move the FireWire off of the PCI bus in their latest chip sets and connect it directly to the G4 processor bus, giving them the potential for superior performance. In general, this makes sense to me. At 3200 Mb/s what would prevent us from having a system with an internal expansion architecture based entirely on 1394 that did away with PCI entirely? The connectors would sure as hell be a lot smaller. Isochronous data transfer might work really well for a video card and other such devices, too. (Your BIOS will have to support 1394, of course, to even be able to display POST information). If Intel would get their heads out of their asses when it comes to 1394, they could use the same approach architecturally: front side bus bridges directly to PCI, 1394, and main memory. Philip Odom
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
First off I doubt you've ever heard Schlong's PunkSide Story.
2nd Opera, etc is pompus BS. Speaking as the brother of an opera singer, Opera is for rich people to show off how "cultural" they are, and none of them gives a shit about the actual music, story, etc. It is all about "see and being seen", except maybe for 2 or 3 of the actors/singers in the show. Besides almost all that epic storeytelling has the depth of a Brothers Grimm/Disney fairytail.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Maudib:
/. readers got it the first time, and those who didn't might enjoy trying to figure out what it means.
Cool sig, but you don't need to give the hint to go read Dune. Most
Cheers.
www.jmagar.com
-
Hot plugable scsi! Then all my dreams could finally come true.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
It's an IEEE standard, moron. What, you've never noticed it called 'IEEE 1394' before?
Well, call my cynical but this appears to be a way for Intel to sell more DSP chips.
FireWire is here, now, faster than USB 2, installed on all Macs, just about all Digital Video cameras and many scanners, hard drives, CD roms, zip drives, printers etc.
The really nice thing about USB was that it's really cheap, perfect for cheap peripherals that don't need high bandwidth like mice, keyboards, webcams, cheap scanners etc. FireWire is nice because it's high performance but (was) more expensive.
Now Intel are trying to make USB high performance but FireWire (an IEEE standard) is already there. The only possible reason for this that I can think of is to control the standard and try sell everyone their own DSP chips.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
While the USB web site claims that USB 2.0 is the bee's knees, they are a bit misleading when they give performance numbers. As this article points out, the backwards compatablity of USB 2.0 eats into the speed by quite a bit. And according to this article, USB lacks a lot of features of Firewire, may add significant complexity to hubs, and require more costly cables. (And I thought that I was getting ripped off on USB cables today!)
USB is a great spec, but USB 2.0 isn't the right solution to the problems that Firewire is designed to solve.
USB 2 is a poorly executed hack perpetrated by Intel purely because they couldn't handle having to pay the FireWire licensing fees.
FireWire (even the 400 Mbps 1394a version that is currently shipping) is superior to USB 2. It has several important advantages, perhaps the most important being that it is root-independent.
FireWire explicitly includes peer-to-peer transfer. You do not need a computer to hook FireWire devices together and let them communicate. On the other hand, USB is explicitly designed as a computer peripheral bus--the root node must always be a computer. Without a computer powered on and managing the Universal Serial Bus, it's useless.
FireWire's isochronous support came first and is more robust than USB's. Up to 90% of each USB frame is reserved for isochronous data (combined with interrupt packets like mouse clicks), compared to 80% for FireWire. However, USB's isochronous cycles trigger every millisecond, where FireWire's trigger eight times per millisecond, making more efficient use of bus time by dividing it into smaller intervals. FireWire's higher bus speeds make it a far more robust isochronous transport.
FireWire allows bridging buses together, up to 1023 of them. There are already USB bridges in discussion (perhaps available), but they skirt the edges of the specification. If you can plug a single device into two computers through USB, each computer will see the peripherals downstream from the "bridge," but the bridge has to include lots of special logic so the two computers don't try to use the same peripherals at the same time. I'd be awfully wary of plugging a disk drive into such a setup.
It's hard to say whether USB 2.0 will overcome these deficiencies--but if it does, it will basically be FireWire. Intel was a great proponent of FireWire until just about the time the company realized they were going to have to pay royalties on chips like every-one else. That's when Intel decided that FireWire was useful only for consumer electronics (like camcorders), but the quickly-invented USB 2.0 would be the preferred way to connect printers, scanners, disk drives, and so on. Since the licensing fee matter was decided, all those companies that had been ambivalent on FireWire are again behind it--including Microsoft--except Intel.
He's no good to me dead.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
A couple of cents is still more than no cents.
And I dont think 50 cents on a 10$ mouse is ridiculously low for instance so there was a real need for USB 1.x. And from there its only a small step to seeing the market for USB 2.0, backwards compatibility and being able to use the old connectors and cabling are both very good reasons... and you save yourself a couple of cents, given how low margins tend to be in the computer biz its not unimportant.
Never has the world seen a standard that is so cross-platform. I can buy a scanner and plug it directly into a PC, a Mac, you name it. And although Serial was/is cool, you can only do so much with it due to speed limitations.
Well, I don't know about your experience with it, but from what I have seen USB is still poorly supported on nearly ALL os's. Sure the latest MS OS will run it, but that is about it.
For example, we got a USB burner at work, and we tried to hook it up to a Mac running the latest MacOS. Guess what, to be able to use it, you have to reboot with all extensions turned off, EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO USE IT. I don't know if this is just the specific drivers for this burner being crappy, or what, but this is simply not acceptable, and nothing should ever be released to market with such shitty support.
sigh.
-----------------------------
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Intel likes ide hard drives, why? because they are processor dependant. They waste cpu cycles doing laborious io processing. SCSI controllers are not cpu bound and contain a seperate chip to do the io. Intel designed usb 1.0, 1.1. and 2.0 with the goals of... 1. Cheap components that 2. Make you need a faster computer. Microsoft loves it too and uses it as a stick to get people on the win98 bandwagon...
This original work may be rebroadcast without written or implied consent.
We have the best government that money can buy.
In my humble experience when anyone has said that something is better it usually conotates that it is far more expensive. Why don't we actually *stabalize* on one standard that dosn't shaft people all the time and just get with the program. If people know that they are going to need massive bandwidth between devices in the future then just make a standard that has 1 billions yottabytes of transfer width and make it *cheap* and *affordable* and *compatable*. Then down the line you can slowly improve it using the *same* interface. So called improvements in PC technology havn't changed a damn thing except for the most affluent. I personally am seriously thinking about becomming interested in considering looking into someday getting better computer and I don't know where to turn that won't let me get screwed but some person who wants his digital camera to be faster than his T-3 connection transfering pictures of his lizard and other junk. I want there to be a clear standard about what to do. Consider the standard COM port. That is a piece of gold there. No change there. Nothing changed, everything got 100% perfected for it good linux support and the like. Consider the *interface* for modems. The hayes compatable/AT command set virtually guarantees that the modem will work under linux and work well with almost anything that follows the spec. Standard 1.44 Megabyte floppy drives are another little consideration. They work flawlessly and well for what they do. Sure some crazy people thought that paying something like $10 per individual media was "cool" and "progressive" for things like LS 120 disks or even more for zip cartriges and other junk but it's expensive and difficult to justify for anything but the most necessary purtchesses. CD burners havn't come down in price at all and there isn't good support for all CD drives in linux (largely because of said "competition") and so I dhave to use old DOS drivers from 1995 to get mine to work which means another reboot. What I don't get is why people don't use graduated interface methods that are specified *now*. For example you could theoretically extend a spec for any possible configuration indefinately if at least the main connectors were compatable and kept in a well done methodical upgrade path. I don't get what happened to compatable parts that were part of American manufacturing techniques. Just have specs for everything up to say what the USS Enterprise would need but keep the same connectors. At least some people would be sparred another needless upgrade for other people to get that 2% increase in their computer (which becomes to be all but mathmetically unnoticeable after a while with all the human perception being limited and all).
Respond to s
As long as I am pointing it out in other threads might as well remind people here :)
They assume the high speed bus will kick down for low/fast speeds (those are USB 1.x speeds). Instead they use translators, all communications between high speed devices occur at high speed.
USB is a Universal bus. CPUs and Memory subsystems are not the target of this general purpose bus in the desktop world.
That fine with me. I don't manufacture USB devices and in fact many other people don't do massive manufacturing techniques. That's the realm of billionaires.
Respond to s
For enough money a dot matrix printer and a stealth bomber are crossplatform data transfer devices.
Respond to s
If it didn't cost a fortune and need replacing we wouldn't be making "progress".
Respond to s
There is an IEEE-1394 patent pool for which you have to pay per system, whereas the USB 2.0 adopter's agreement costs you nothing apart from a license to technique's used in your implementation of the standard.
My goal is to have each device on my machine use a different interface!!! (SARCASM ON)That would be Cool(SARCASM OFF)
SCSI for my Jaz
FireWire for my Camcorder
USB for my Rio
Parallel for my Printer
PS/2 for my mouse
Serial for my Dig Cam
and finally....drumroll please....
USB2 for that Scanner I have needed for a long time...
(What a wasteland hardware has become!!!)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
And although not very deep, some music is just fun to listen to.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
Why hasnt USDB taken off farther as a networking medium? If we're hitting speeds of 480Mbps, it would seem like a great solution.
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
OK, maybe I am the only one who goes out and buys used hardware, and as-is stuff, but I have lots of SCSI cards (mostly SCSI-2) which I got for less than $30 each (usually $5). I got 1 gig Hard drives for $2. (3 of 4 worked, at an as-is sale).
Sure Firewire may be faster, but when all you can find is $100 or so cards, I will stick to SCSI for external stuff and IDE/ATAPI for big, slow, huge, cheap internal drives. Try looking for sales at computer stores where you live.
Apple had its chance back in 1988 to popularize FireWire. Yes, 1988, when they developed the standard. I don't know of any PC mobos with built-in FireWire, but EVERYBODY has USB. Manufacturers aren't going to spend an extra $20 on a FireWire controller chip for each mobo, so FireWire's never going to be "the standard."
On a side note, Apple's new "Apple Display Connector" is probably the dumbest thing I've seen, but they got one thing right: SQUEEZE CLIPS! Why do I have to spend 45 seconds unscrewing my fscking VGA and DVI connectors? Why not a goddamn squeeze clip like in Wide SCSI?
Quick! Before DVI becomes too widespread, somebody convince the guys/gals in charge to adopt squeeze clips on the DVI connector.
Asa
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Perhaps, but if you want any quality at all a 741 op-amp is a braindead idea. It was pretty good back in the seventies (actually it wasn't good, it just was the only decent op-amp back then) but nowadays there are MANY better options (like the cheap and good TL072).
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
USB has taken years to "take-off" for a reason; USB is a classic example of a "de-commoditized protocol" (the term used in the halloween document). USB is complex beyond comprehension or reason. It appears to be designed to be as hard to implement, port, or basicly reuse as possible.
Try and imagine a protocol feature that has no purpose other than complexity, and USB has it; logic levels...lets have three (1,0, and J), baudrates... lets have two... simultaniously (2.0 makes that three now), what else... read the spec and weep.
ABO
ABO
Do watch TV while driving the car?
Ever notice how TV news stories are 80% told in the voice-over? The pictures are usually either library or establishing shots.. Shut your eyes during the next TV news bulletin and see how much you miss out on.. not much is my guess.
TV and radio are two different media; each has their place.
And here you go again: Reading a good book at a library or perhaps going to a nice play or even opera is better than getting pure music.
Making statements of your opinion as if they are some kind of fact is bogus. Many would disagree with your statement (I would personally), but I wouldn't claim my personal preference was a self-evident truth. You can't prove (or disprove) an opinion, (unlike a belief).
Never generalise! :-)
I hate the use of MB. Mb-Megabit, MB-MegaByte.
Also, Mega, in computers means 2^20 not 10^6!
I could imagine this ad for my computer (with this *stuff*, and overclock (haven't tested this high, yet))
731 MHz web server 440GB Hard drive, 536MB RAM
$300
for a
500MHz, 51GB (a "45"+"10" GB), 64MB RAM computer.
Makes me sick!
I'm quite confident that I'll manage to configure my own system properly, so this only applies for people working in Tech support, (god have mercy on their souls) and people without the know-how.
In other words, OPP. :)
A penny for your thoughts.
A witty
The reason you don't see many Hard drives and such like using USB is coz the maufacturers buggered up the storage device class specifications, meaning that there are a bundle of different sub-classes, and none of them are much good, so no-one bothered supporting them on the host machines (WinPC's, Mac etc). This means that every manufacturer has to write their own drivers rather than just using one generic one. This is a pain in the neck. :(
...hence you'll not actually get 480 Mb/s. You may get something close, coz the traffic tends to be largely in one direction. PS: Your USB mouse will NOT get any faster, coz it is a low speed device. It gets polled about once every millisecond at most (if I remember my USB spec correctly)
Ummm...whatever happened to firewire? Better standard...
-- mikeDOTd
From what I've read, when the host is talking to a USB 1.X device, the entire USB bus runs at USB 1.X speed. Every time slot assigned to a USB 1.X device results in the entire bus running at low speed during that time slot. The USB 1.X hub doesn't behave like a packet switch, more like an signal buffer/amplifier.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
64-bit 66 Mhz PCI can go 528 megabytes per second. This baby does 480 megabits per second or 120 megabytes per second. Even plain old 32-bit 33 Mhz PCI does 132 megabytes per second. The current Fibre Channel standard supports up to 4.24 gigabits or 542.72 megabytes per second. Single FC adapters are already pushing 190 MB and getting faster. After working with this kind of stuff, I have to admit that USB seems downright slow. Now if only FC would get cheaper...
-- soldack
They assumed the same scheme of low/fast speed bus sharing would be used with low-fast/high speed bus sharing... or in other words they were assuming Intel and the rest of the USB forum are morons.
:)
If there were morons it was them for making such stupid assumptions. Intel uses a translator to translate low-fast to high speed communication and vice versa.
As for complexity in hubs... gates are cheap, I am willing to bet you could loose the cost of the extra gates (manufacturing costs) in the IEEE-1394 patent pool licensing fee's for a single system. As for cables, fully USB 1.x compliant cable's are USB 2.0 compliant too. That said, I have no doubt what percentage of cables is fully compliant
Wouldn't this require the replacement of all USB 1.X hubs with USB 2.0 hubs/translators? Some existing USB hubs are built into other devices, like keyboards and monitors, and can't be easily replaced.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Get over it. I get pretty tired of people complaining about per port fees paid to Apple. There is a very simple way of avoiding them, call it "1394", call it "i.link" or call it "Bob, my fast thin friend". Apple's fees are a pretty poor excuse not to use FireWire. It's an open standard and it works, it works fast, and it works fast now.
You can leave all your USB 1.x hubs and devices like they are, you can use the free port on your shiny new USB 2.x host for 1 USB 2.0 device... but if you want more than 1 yes you are going to have to shell out for a new hub yeah.
The really weird part is that USB it is such a great standard, but in reality it is not used much where it could be useful. I think major applications include perpherials, like cameras, scanners, etc.
But they have barely touched on external hard drives and devices of that sort. I beleive Evergreen had come out with one, but that is really the only hard drive device I have seen.
I think the reason for that is the technology is changing...as soon as USB came out, another, faster technology (firewire) could already take its place.
Maybe we should concentrate on one specific technology and expand on it. That way it will become more useful.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I wouldn't even bother with USB 2.0, the spec - not the final-delivered-real-thing that hardware developers might soon start testing (not shipping) only barely beats IEEE 1394a speeds of 400Mbit/s currently in use and well supported by real shipping hardware. Remember too that IEEE 1394 doesn't even require a computer to connect compatible devices. Just wait for 1394b, with improved communications specs and 800 Mbit/s... Can't wait 'til I get some 1394-native portable storage using this to work with my laptop.... and camcorder, digital camera, scanner, printer, TV, PDA, MTB, 4WD, fridge/freezer, etc.
Yay! this is great. but its too little too late. Dont get me wrong, im not at all in favor of FireWire/IEEE 1394/iLink, but it is on almost _every_ video camera that is shipping.
Mark Duell
You're wrong.
n -suit-wearing-pinheads just can't plunder every fucking dollar I earn and take the food from my mouth.
It's not the music that people are after. That's part of it, yes.
But while I agree with you that, sure, we should pick our battles -- and, sure, "human life" is more important than music -- understand that what's at stake here is freedom of expression -- and the last time I checked, freedom of expression -- freedom of speech, however you want to spin it -- is a fundamental freedom that is constantly in danger of being snapped up not by government itself, but by corporations manipulating technology, manipulating government, and, ultimately, manipulating consumers.
The battle isn't about music. It's about the way in which art is controlled by corporate interests. For fuck's sake: it's no secret that in America (at least) government more often than not is in the pocket of big corporations. Sure, Microsoft lost their battle against the government, but it doesn't take a MacArthur Fellow to realize that no matter what the outcome of big business versus big governement, the winner will *always* be big business.
It's for that reason that people are concerned about music. Sure, human rights are important. No one here will deny it. But, as you say, you gotta pick your battles. Fundamental intellectual freedoms are as fundamental to human life as any other freedom. Please don't assume that all Slashdotters are so short-sighted to believe that all we're doing is bypassing encryption or trying to get something for nothing.
In this case -- the USB topic -- what's at stake is control and the extent of said control. Corporations -- RIAA, MPAA, whatever -- what absolute and total control. They don't have foresight enough to predict technologies, but they sure as shit know the "bad" technologies from the "good" technologies once the technologies start to threaten their profits. This is not about music. This is not about USB. This is not even about the poor schmuck of a artist who makes the music.
It's about corporate profits. Corporations will throw all their economic might against anything that threatens their profits -- or threatens their *potential* profits.
So don't get all holier-than-thou and pretend that music doesn't count. Or pretend that that on one side there's human life and the "real issues" and on the other side there's the crazy Slashdotters who care only about encryption and getting something for nothing.
Freedom is something -- and it's not for nothing that freedom in any form is something that must be fiercely protected and vigilently maintained.
Corporations will have you believe otherwise. Corporations will have you believe that your entitled to what they *give* you -- and believe me, pal, that ain't much. They want you to believe in their version of freedom. Freedom of the corporations to "grant" consumers what they (the corporations) think the consumers need. And the corporations think we should be grateful -- because without big business controlling and manipulating the consumers, we'd be (to paraphrase David Mamet) a bunch of savage shitheads in the wilderness.
Corporations want you to believe in the second coming of Acme, Incorporated. They want you to believe and be grateful because, boy, Acme Incorporated has what you need.
Well fuck you and fuck Acme Incorporated. That's what all this about. Fuck Acme Incorpoated why? Because fuck their profits. Their profits are dollars and pounds and marks and francs out of our own fucking pockets.
We're buying the Porsche's for the suits who run these corporations. We're buying the luxury apartments of the CEOs who get their golden parachutes when the stockholders suddenly realize that Zippy the Second Coming of Christ isn't pulling in the sort of profits we, er, think might be appropriate.
So fuck the music. Fuck the USB. This is about insuring that everyone gets a fair shake. This is about making sure that corporations know their boundaries. They can't just walk the fuck into our living rooms and kitchens and open our refrigerators and take our fucking bread.
This is about saying, wait just a fucking minute: the buck stops here. You and your band of corporate bad-breath-startac-talking-Porsche-driving-italia
That's what this is about. And, yes, it's as important as any fundamental human issue.
Ok, so we got faster USB with 2.0 this means nothing. USB hogs so much processor power that this is useless! USB ethernet slows down a machine horribly. USB scanners are as slow as Parallel scanners. and USB keyboard/mice is just stupid! (hey can I get a SCSI keyboard?) I have tried and tried to use this USB port for what it is touted for and it constantly fails to meet what it says it will do. Now, firewire.. that's a different story. It acts so much like SCSI it is scary.. there is almost no load on the system during a transfer from our sony betacam digital cameras to the AVID. Every firewire device we have works like a champ.
USB... if they make it so that processing happens OUTSIDE the CPU then it will work... but if you have to use my processor cycles to do basic things (I will not tolerate a WIN-USB interface) then throw it away as crap, along with the computer software dependant modems,printers and other devices.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Although usb and firewire seem nice, are they really usefull? HDD have scsi which is a very nice standard(s); parellel and ps/2 are very versatile and fast enough; scanners and the like (digital cameras...etc) can also use scsi, as can most int/ext devices. Is a new technology worth trashing all existing equipment for?
Never has the world seen a standard that is so cross-platform. I can buy a scanner and plug it directly into a PC, a Mac, you name it. And although Serial was/is cool, you can only do so much with it due to speed limitations.
I think USB 2 will usher in a new era of connectivity. I admit, I don't own any USB devices, because as it was noted, it looks cooler on paper than in real life (conflicts, freeze ups, lack of support)...
USB2 should solve all of these problems, and you must admit, the transfer speeds are nice. Maybe I should go out and get a USB2 scanner when they're available...
You forgot The Necromancer and The Fountain of Lamneth.
--
My mouse will no longer be my bottleneck, yes.
Does anyone know what became of this? Does the final USB2 spec contain any such anti-consumer features?
Yes, and if there's any question that Intel could profitably include firewire in their chipsets, just take a look the millions of USB-enabled computers shipped in 1996-7 that had no drivers. My guess is that a vast majority of these machines have never been used with USB.
In Slashdot Terms, millions of consumers payed the "Intel USB Tax" without any clear benefit to themselves. They are going to start paying the USB 2.0 Tax, so one might as well throw FireWire in there too.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I'm sorry to say that I'd have to disagree on both points.
[here in Europe t least] I can get all sorts of USB equipment, Harddrives, cd-rom burner, MO drives, tapebackup, cameras, webcams, scanners printers, mice, monitors keyboards, and even a cool little thing that'll diagnose why Your PC wont POST !
So there's LOTSA cools stuff around (mail me if You want links to these products but cannot locate them Yourself), problem is that I really don't want to BUY a substandard harddrive, or whatever at a much higher cost and much lower speed/size than if i bought "the real thing".
Which brings me to my second point. USB is NOT a cool standard because it's not able to keep up with current speeds and technology. However, I do believe that with the implementation (not just the agrement upon) of the new 2.0 standard, Your point might proove to become alid in the near future. I too have a ziliion cool ideas of what to do with USB if the speed (amongst other things) gets bump in the right direction.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Microchannel? There may have been microchannel hard disk interfaces back in the golden days of the PS/2, but I dare you to find one now.
Where can i pick up my 3.75Gbit (480*8/1024) timothy just forgot to correct the typo. Darn...
Mark Duell
You mean that CD that will be obsolete in a few years because the industry wants to see you the same music all over again in a new format? And the CD whose metallic layer will oxidize away? The CDs that only fit into large, cumbersome portable CD players?
I paid for the music once, and I don't intend to buy it again. I have converted my CDs into MP3 so that I can keep them around easily and use them in a small portable player. I have also converted vinyl to MP3 because some classical recordings aren't even available anymore in modern formats.
All of that is fair use of content that I paid for, not piracy. If the music industry wants to go to a complete rental model for music, they better start by lowering their prices drastically. Otherwise, their are engaging in fraud: claiming to sell you content while knowing full well that its lifetime is limited to a few years.
1394 Home Interconnects are obviously a priority to Sony. (Why else would the Playstation 2 have one?)
But, they are probably on hold until they can decide on some vendor neutral encryption standard. Lots of companies are having a connector war with HDTV equipment too, and might be unwilling to support a 'Sony' standard.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Buy FireWire for your external interface needs and contribute to the Linux FireWire effort. FireWire devices are here. You can pick up FireWire PCI cards for under $100, and external FireWire disk enclosures taking an IDE drive for $150. There are some scanners, CD-RWs, and other peripherals, in addition to the A/V FireWire devices. FireWire is quickly becoming a feasible substitute for SCSI.
...but the water will not be stopped.
:-) If no one has figured out how to stream the content from a movie inserted in a DVD-ROM drive out a PC's 1394 port, hopefully they will do so soon. Then if somebody wants to, they can make their own tabletop DVD deck as a PC appliance.
"there are no 1394 DVD decks and there never will be"
Yes there are - they're called PCs
Apply structural markup instead of trying to pretty print and leave the formatting to the browser on the other side. That's why ./ offers HTML posting, after all....
Not something that is fair play at all. Anything that is too expensive is far too close to useless for most of humanity to bother with.
Respond to s
>could hook your 1394 HDTV to a 1394 DVD player
>and enjoy
From what I've heard, there are no 1394 DVD decks and there never will be - The DVD industry has made that a condition of licensing.
I may be wrong and I hope I am, but I don't think so.
I have a 1394 VCR and I love it - I wish I could buy a 1394 DVD...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
The current Fibre Channel standard supports up to 542.72 megabytes per second or 4.24 gigabits per second. Single controllers are already going 190-200 MB/sec. Meanwhile gigabit eithernet is only moving at 128 MB/sec (some go a bit faster). They are using Fibre Channel for SANs with multiple RAID arrays connected. Needless to say, it flies! Pretty soon files will be loaded before you even open them! :-)
-- soldack
Just how is it good for anything more than getting all the data that threaded mode takes away? You can't tell the flow of the discussion, you can't tell who said what in relation to whom, you in fact miss the whole point which slashdot was set up under and that is making cosmments to others in a public forum. Unless flat mode starts to contain little tags or text data saying "post made in reply to post #415" or something like that. Trust me as a person who obcesses about this thing I know what's ultimately useful. You could spend hours trying to sort out the subtle nouances of the discussion or take maybe 30 seconds to look at an entire sotry in nested mode in say netscape/IE/w3m/(lynx 2-7 and before they screwed up the nested table support the newer releases are shit). Threaded mode is also useless unless you like making 4,000+ little connections to slashdot's sometimes slow server over modem links. So tell me how can one actually judge content properly in flat mode at all or in fact gain any meaningful data from it?
Respond to s
But you can use all those cool old USB devices and totally slow your new USB2 network down to USB1 transfer rates, now thats genius. Too bad Crapple got so greedy with firewire.
Don't forget about IEEE 1394B. It'll run at 800Mb with support for upgrades to 1.6Gb and 3.2Gb.
Dave
~""~
Yes I have seen articles linked below which said as much... but their respective writers were apparently a bit too much firewire zealots to point out the obvious alternative which the USB forum has chosen. The USB hub's and controller's have translator's, all communications between high speed devices occur at high speed.
You are quite correct in that it has been reported, but those reporters were quite wrong. Pity that they couldnt be content with just arguing Firewire's strongpoint but had to assume weaknesses on USB 2.0's without proper facts to back the assumption up... if they had at least pointed out the obvious alternative I would have had some respect for them, but as it is those articles were just partisan propoganda.
Well can the PCI bus handle 480 Mb? Yes. 32-bit 33 Mhz PCI goes up to 132 MB/second, more than enough. 64-bit, 66 Mhz hits 528 MB which blows this away. PCI isn't dead yet.
-- soldack
Didn't people figure out not to buy products that broke. That used to be called getting scammed.
It makes my head spin. That is almost as bad as the stupid $800 MP3 player that slashdot has been advertising lately. What a waste of time. I could get a better stero system for less than that and it would be less prone to breakage.
Respond to s
In USB 1.x a low speed device (1.5mbps) occupies the entire bus and takes time from standard speed (12mbps) devices.
In USB 2.0, though. the hubs have buffers and do active rate matching. A standard speed device will NOT bring down the speed of the bus and will not get in the way of high speed (480mbps) transfers. The silicon space to do this is quite negligible these days.
Intel has supported 1394 for years - it was going to be the successor to IDE. In USB conferences prior to 1998 they kept talking about how USB and 1394 are complementary - 1394 will never be cheap enough for a mouse. If something made them change their mind I believe they have a real reason.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
This is great, and I really encourage people to continue to develop more devices for USB, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the outcome of USB is, and how it will tie-in peripherals and components, but we need more support for other operating systems. I've read that USB keyboards and mice are supported at least by linux, which is a good first step, but the vast majority of USB devices are things like cameras and scanners. Till things like this get supported, I'm forced to just look at them on the shelves. No computer today comes without USB ports, and it's just really frustrating that OSs like BSD, Linux, and BeOS can't take advantage of them. oh well, es la vida...
Check out my sysadmin blog!
When I first read about USB (wow, I don't even remember when exactly, before it became mainstream), I looked at its speed capability and I thought that was a stupid mistake. Here you have a standard that allows for hot-swappable devices connected in long chains all taking up just one set of resources. Since USB came out I was hoping that the faster standard (or pseudo-standard, it's not really that popular) firewire would take off because of speed.
:-).
Now it would seem that they're improving the USB standard so it fixes the largest negative against it - speed. Before this external hard drives and even CD-ROM drives weren't practical. I mean, it beat serial speeds by far, but it didn't even come close to Ultra-wide SCSI (my favored external interface...and internal too if the hard drives weren't so expensive
It's just too bad that now the current USB implementation is everywhere, and it'll take awhile to move to this new standard. Oh well, can't have everything.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Speakers will eventually be made tamper-proof like cable boxes. A speaker that has been opened will refuse to accept encrypted streams.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I was floored when i saw the 480 MB/s...Whoa.
But then, I headed to the website to see that it is 480 Mbit/s.
Damn...I would've been going out to buy the new USB 2.0 PCI cards tomorrow evening
Anyway, a little more on topic, this is pretty cool stuff. I have a scanner, webcam, and occasionally a 100BT network adapter (among some other random things sometimes) plugged into my USB ports, and I can't use more than one at one time without severely affecting the performance of all the others. My Intel webcam goes blank when I'm transferring a large file over the ethernet!
I doubt that anyone cares about my trials with USB 1.1, but this is sorely needed if USB is to have a future. This definitely is giving it a good jolt and allowing it to remain a competetive, popular, easy to use standard with firewire and Serial ATA (I don't know too much about this...is it still in the works? What's the difference between it and, say, firewire?)
Firewire (IEEE-1394) is here today, works better at high speeds, an IEEE standard, with working silicon and device drivers. Why not use it?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The piece of hardware dosn't do burning just reading. I just used CD burners in my analysis because I havn't seen too many good/cheap things that would work with my old computer. My drive is a Adaptec model (that much I do know) I just forget which. The newer kernel didn't like it and just kept probing away at it. I even got irritated enough to take my grievences to the kernel mailing list (it should be in the archive a while back). They weren't much help. Basically the detection code goes through all the LUNS and trys to detect the drive but it dosn't work at all. I believe it's on LUN 2 from the dos drivers and they work the first time and they are old. Basically this setup prevents use of redhat or anything that uses big bunches of packages or on-cd package installation. I even have installed dos games off the thing. The only problem is the win 3.1 interface to the drive which screws up badly. Believe me the problems have been real and severe. It wasn't until a while age (about a year to a year an a half that I could even figure out how to force the stupid X server to figure out that I had some card that could do more than 16 colors and then to get the mach 32 server to work took even more time and that gives me signal 11 errors from a *video card* strange !)
Respond to s
Rush: 2112 (from the 2112 album)
Rush: The Trees (from Hemispheres)
That's just one artist. Want more?
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
somehow this doesn't seem too realistic seeing how the top end of USB 1.1 is ~12 MBit/sec... I think you have a major bottle neck in there somewhere...
I start to run out and the line widths are limited too. Also it dosn't automatically resize as well. It's a hard habit to break at other terminals and machines but I try to learn.
Respond to s
I've always said we need a faster bus than PCI. That puny 100MB/sec bus can't stand up much longer, what with 160MB/sec SCSI and 80MB/sec Gigabit ethernet cards coming into wide use...
Perhaps an entirely USB-based system is the answer. 480MB/sec should be ample bandwidth for tomorrow's PCs (especially if switched). Your basic "system" would be nothing more than a USB backplane, to which you'd attach CPU modules, RAM modules, I/O modules, etc. Thanks to USB's forward-thinking design, neat tricks like adding and removing RAM, graphics cards, and hard drives from a running sytem should be trivially possible...
It means that two FireWire devices can work directly with each other, for instance a DV camcorder connecting directly to a storage device.
Generally USB (even 2.0, I think) devices require some central USB controller to handle communication between devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree that the ubiquity of FireWire on digital video cams is one feather that FireWire has in its cap. Personaly, I love FireWire. But at what point does "must-comply-with-the-standard" kick in? Isn't it a little too early to forego any possibility of competition between the two standards when it comes to the areas where they are able to compete?
Especially when it comes to issues of bandwidth -- today's fat pipe is just tomorrow's bottleneck -- we should be open to increased competition betwen evolving standards. In the end, we have to concede that market confusion and incompatibilities will sometimes be the price you pay for BETTER STUFF.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
I always hear people/articles say USB 1.x for keyboards, mice, etc. and use Firewire for Disk drives, cameras, scanners, etc.
Why couldn't or wouldn't you use Firewire for keyboards and mice? (per port fees aside) I would think that using one system would make things a lot easier. Would they have an effect on speed like USB 1.x devices should on USB 2 devices?
Well, time to wait three more months for the 2.4 kernel to include THIS too...
Stop inventing standards so fast! It's GNU, we have to play catch-up! (most of the time, this is true)
# debian/rules