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1394 Trade Association Adopts FireWire Brand
MaxVlast writes in that the
The 1394 Trade Association has adopted the FireWire trademark, logo and symbol as a brand identity for the IEEE 1394 connection standard in a "no-fee license agreement" between 1394ta and Apple. Apple has also granted 1394ta the right to sub-license the FireWire Trademark for use on products, packaging and promotion of the standard.
USB 2 suffers from a master / slave design. Theoretically one can plug a firewire drive into a firewire camera, and transfer footage from the camera directly to the HD. And you can run IP over firewire, for some really fast / cheap LAN for a central storage server.
On top of that, 1394b supports up to 1.2Gbps or 1.6 Gbps (depending on the media) which is being developed. And it works nicely with 1394a.
FireWire has many advantages over USB 2.0 that far outweigh the extra 80Mb/s USB2 claims over the current iteration of FireWire. Most importantly is the fact that it is peer-to-peer, meaning that no host PC is required to manage every FW connection. This makes firewire a good choice for video equipment, and interesting is also being adopted in the auto industry to connect electronic components together. Also, data carried over FireWire carries certain priority information with it, depending on the type of data being transferred. Video data or a CD burning session can thus be treated with a higher priority that pictures from a still camera. Anyone who has hooked up a USB CD burner downstream from their printer can attest to the importance of such a mechanism.
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
First of all, Firewire allows devices on its bus to talk directly to each other. Thus when transferring data on a bus with a hard drive, computer, and camera the data can go directly from the camera to the hard drive.
With USB each device sends its data first to the host controller, and then back out to the device it was intended to go to. This effectively cuts the bandwidth of the bus in half and also limits the bus to how fast the central controller can handle requests. So using USB in the camera-computer-hard drive combo above, the data would go from the camera to the computer, then back out the computer to the hard drive.
Secondly, Firewire is built to handle streaming data. It handles reserving bandwith much better than USB 2.0 does. This is very important when you are recording from a camera to a hard drive and the data is time-dependant.
Thirdly, Firewire is able to operate much closer to sustaining its theoretical maximum of 400Mbps. USB 2.0's 480Mbps data rate is a burst data rate and cannot come even close to sustaining that rate of transfer. I've heard that your average transfer rates over a Firewire bus is going to be around 75% of theoretical, where USB 2.0 is around 50% of theoretical. These results can vary, but Firewire almost definitely outperforms USB 2.0 for sustained data transfers.
Another big problem is that USB tends to transfer data at the rate of the slowest device on the bus, Firewire does not share this limitation.
Lastly, Firewire is due for a speed bump very soon. Probably late this year you will see Firewire bump up to 800Mbps, a much better rate than the current USB 2.0 rate of 480Mbps.
Now I'm not saying that USB 2.0 is utter crap. It is decent when you only have a couple of devices connected that are not doing sustained transfers. So it should be great for printers, mice, keyboards, etc. However, when it comes to video cameras, hard drives, and other devices that need good sustained transfer rates, I'll stick with Firewire. Not to mention that it is already included with the majority of these devices and USB 2.0 is not.
Sapere aude!
I find it amusingly ironic that Apple, the makers of the iMac, iBook, iPod, and many iApps call the technology "FireWire", yet Sony call it "iLink".
Actually, Sony has been promoting i.Link as an alternative name because of the angst cause by the translation of "FIREWIRE" into the Japanese language. Culturally, the Japanese seem to take product and marketing use of language and naming much more seriously than Westerners...
In English, we can easily distort meanings and make allusions to fuctionality with the same words and we fluidly do so.. In the case of "Hot" refferring to temperature, trendiness or even sexiness all taken in an appropriate contextual setting; the English speaker is not likely to experience any particular mental anguish regarding the particular usage of the term.
In this case, "Fire" and associations with "wire" porvide a particular image of speed. In Japanese, the Kanji "hi" (-hee-) is literally *Fire* and quite dangerous. Associating that with "wire" possibly alludes to the quite frequent burning down of older buildings with less than adequate electrical systems (a whole other topic).
Unfortunately, due to access to world press the term "FireWire" or "fieyawieya" is widely known in the technical community along with the "IEEE1394". Unfortunately, as computer people are just beginning to become acquainted with video technology, few seem to have made the connection between "fireWire" and "iLink".
Whining crybaby companies like Lucent, who got on the 1394 bandwagon too late. Apple developed Firewire (1394) on it's own, and then partnered with Sony and Texas Instruments to provide chipsets and other products. As these companies and some others formed a consortium for patent sharing (similar to JDEC for RAM), they had a trivial, if not free licensing for early adopters. Sometime after the IEEE accepted this as the 1394 standard, the consortium decided to charge royalties to the "Johnny-come-lately" companies that didn't sign on early. All of the early adopters that shouldered the weight of developing this technology were allowed to use the catchy name that Apple coined, Firewire. Sony had a bit of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome and probably felt that it could market this as a proprietary technology by calling it i.Link.
Lucent and some other laggards got all huffy, because they found USB to suck, too late in the game, and wanted to produce chipsets for Firewire too. Because they were slow to the mark, they would be charged a licensing fee to use the name and symbology of Firewire. By just following the 1394 standard, they didn't have to license the name Firewire (or i.Link). In geeky magazine ads in embeded systems trade wrags, Lucent went as far as admonishing customers "Don't use the 'F' word, its 1394!"
I have nothing against Lucent, but they are the one that springs to my mind now. Other PC manufacturers were late to the table (HPaQ) and used 1394 as a label for their ports (which confuses and befuddles their typical users).
-- Len
Basically, they were complete idiots and damn near shot off their foot at the ankle. I think this had a lot to do with the fact that 1394 isn't standard kit on todays PC motherboard chipsets. The royalties alone were close to the cost of the entire chipset.
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Are you saying that the entire chipset of a motherboard cost $1? Because that's how much Apple was charging in royalties for FireWire, until a very public backlash forced them to charge
I disagree with your assessment of why FireWire isn't standard on PC mobo's though. I think it has much more to do with Intel pushing Intel-owned standards such as USB and ATA (in spite of the fact that neither one of those is a true replacement). Had Intel embraced FireWire for the mainstream, then yes, we would see FireWire as ubiquitous on PC's as USB. But it was Intel's marketing strategy to position their competitor's product as being for high-end and niche markets, not for mainstream. Very shrewd.