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FireWire 2 Coming Soon?
Twirlip of the Mists writes "Looks like SmartDisk pulled a Time Canada. IT World reports, 'Several hours after announcing that it is introducing desktop hard drives that connect to Apple Computer Inc. computers using the new high-speed 800M bps (bits per second) FireWire standard, SmartDisk Corp. asked that the news be 'killed due to premature release.'" Sweet.
So then the question now is what will be updated to include FireWire 2? Will it be the PowerMacs? (Probably, they're due for an update), the iMacs? (my guess is no), or the notebooks (my guess is no again, they were just updated)? Looks like someone goofed up and stole Steve's thunder. Who thinks Steve's going to come down in his rage and smite this SmartDisk company?
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Apple has already announced that starting in Jan, 2003, all Apple hardware will only boot in OS X. To me, this means a large-scale accross-the-board upgrade for the entire Mac line. This new news only confirms that possibility. On a side note, I give the Mac hacking community three days (after people actually start to receive these things) to find a way to boot into OS 9 anyways.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Firewire is NOT designed to replace networking. It's a short-range peripheral connection system.
:p
There are a number of different media types that IEEE 1394x can use. But for full-speed of 800Mbps or 1.6Gbps, only STP (short twisted-pair) or expensive multi-mode fiber can be used.
Yes, there are experiments implementing IP over firewire, but nobody is advocating that it replace any kind of Ethernet solution.
Now, on the otherhand, Rendezvous could make Ethernet replace Firewire as a way of connecting peripherals. At some point soon, rendezvous-on-a-chip will make it easy for scanner manufacturers, for example, to allow a scanner to merely be plugged in to an ethernet network and use zero-conf IP to move data.
Think about it:
State-of-the-art ethernet is at 1Gbps full-duplex, with very flexable (& cheap!) cabling requirements. I'm really surprised that nobody is using this signalling technology for peripherals. 1Gbps is faster than even the 800Mbps that 1394b will advertize.
It's the complex interplay of different technology layers, and how to get them to work toegether, that makes this tricky. At the signalling level, i.e. bits on copper or glass, you've got various ethernets, usb, firewire.
Next, how you arrange for multiple devices to share access to the copper or glass; again you've got different methods with ethernets, usb, or firewire.
And then what protocol arranges the bits together to convey information. Firewire and USB include specifications for time-sensitive bits (isochronous) and bus management that ethernet doesn't provide... instead, in networks other protocol layers take care of device discovery and congestion etc.
Which combination of layers is best for various applications has yet to be proven. And they're all moving targets, too!
Once you get up around 1Gbps, the bottleneck is assembling the data to feed to the wire -- if the packets aren't made much bigger, you have to have hefty CPU power to pump that many tiny packets per second and reassemble them...
and now I'm just rambling.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
But for full-speed of 800Mbps or 1.6Gbps, only STP (short twisted-pair) or expensive multi-mode fiber can be used.
For the record, multi-mode fiber optic cable isn't vert expensive any more.
I write in my journal
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