1394 also known as Firewire and I.Link has now a follow up. The b version will improve the speed and makes sure that you can use your external CD-R(W) drive on a longer cable.
1394b provides significant bandwidth, speed, distance and cost-efficiency improvements over the original IEEE 1394-1995 specification. It enables the extension of the standard first to 800 Megabits/second and 1.6 Gigabits/second, then on to 3.2 gigabits/second, using plastic optical fiber. It supports audio and video transfer over plastic optical fiber to 50 meters at 200 Megabits/second, to 100 meters at 400 Megabits/second, and over glass optical fiber at up to 3.2 Gigabits/second. |
A new, highly efficient bus arbitration scheme, known as BOSS (Bus Owner Supervisor Selector) implements overlapped, pipelined arbitration, so the arbitration protocol runs in parallel with data transmissions. Hybrid bus operation enables backward compatibility with 1394-1995 and 1394a.
Costs of 1394b silicon and 1394b-enabled products are expected to be lower than products using earlier versions, according to Michael Johas Teener, chief technology officer at Zayante, Inc. and one of the originators of the FireWire standard. Gate counts for 1394b ICs will double to between 20,000 and 25,000. But its analog design is much simpler because the 'b' version uses unidirectional arbitration signaling instead of common-mode signaling, which improves efficiency and reduces voltages. (See 1394b at a glance, at the end of this news release.)
This standard gets more and more populair, but USB is still more widely used. At least this improvement makes sure that it can keep up with the latest highspeed CD-R(W) drives.
Source: Yahoo.com
