Symwave demoes FireWire 1600 gear

The 1394 Trade Association is already talking up FireWire S3200, but Symwave is taking baby steps, demonstrating a 1.6Gbps system known as S1600 (shocking) that's backwards-compatible with FireWire 800 and 400 this week at a conference in China. That's great and all -- transferring 1000 four megapixel images in five seconds sure sounds like a good time -- but speeds like that probably aren't going to cut it when FireWire 800 devices are already thin on the ground, everyone's looking forward to S3200, and the 4.8Gbps USB 3.0 spec is already making appearances on schedule for a launch in 2010. Not to mention that Wireless USB 1.1's target speed is 1.0Gbps -- you know we'll take a slight speed hit if we can ditch the cables.

[Via PC World; Warning: PDF read link]

[Chebwa @ Apr 9th 2008 2:55AM]

Soon enough, all cables in the world will be ditched... and cancer and impotence will reign supreme.

Mark my words.

[kyle allen @ Apr 9th 2008 2:59AM]

consider them marked

[kyle allen @ Apr 9th 2008 2:57AM]

this would be great if i had a nice ssd

[yoshi @ Apr 9th 2008 3:03AM]

"we'll take a...speed hit if we can ditch the cables".

With USB, you'll be taking a speed hit alright.

[tugger @ Apr 9th 2008 9:40AM]

Firewire always has the edge.
With USB all the data has to pass through the CPU, whereas with Firewire it doesn't.

USB has never ever achieved the promised speeds.

[snitch @ Apr 9th 2008 3:11AM]

Schedule for a launch in 2010??? that's not just around the corner that's 2 freaking years away, & knowing intel we be lucky if we get 1/2 the speed that the thing is capable of, just like USB 2.0 which is slow as hell

[Ray @ Apr 9th 2008 3:50AM]

USB 2.0 theory speed is up to 480mb/s
But I haven't ever see a USB connected Hard Drive can reach more than 38mbytes/s (~ 304mbit/s)
Most can't even go 35mbyte/s (~280mbit/s)

That's around 58% - 64% of the theory speed.

Firewire 800's theory speed is up to 786.432mbit/s
A typical Firewire 800 connected drive could reach 75mbytes/s (~600mbit/s), burst speed 78mbytes (624mbit/s)
That's 76.3% - 79.3% of the theory speed.

802.11n (Draft) products claims theory speed up to 300mbit/s, but few could even hit the 100mbit/s mark even in a pure 802.11n environment.

But anyway the price of Firewire products has to get down, or Firewire might extinct from new personal computers.

[SoloSalsa @ Apr 11th 2008 12:45AM]

Actually, 480 is the maximum speed of all devices through a USB network. Each slave device is limitted to 400mbps. That means that your computer and hub can theoretically send 480mbps between them, but no single device attatched to the hub will exceed 400.

What did you say you're getting? 304mbit/s? That is about three-quarters of maximum, and almost as much as your 1394 speeds. Of course, that's still not as nice as the typical 1394 device, but USB makes up for it with its huge array of devices.

There are so many USB data protocols ranging from Picture Transfer Protocal and PictBridge to keyboards to some new monitors. 1394 isn't good for much other than large storage and camcorders. USB has it's spot in the tech world: cheap low bandwidth applications. Virtually all mice, keyboards and gaming peripherals are still running at only 1.1 speeds.

[michas_pi @ Apr 9th 2008 4:51AM]

FireWire forever.

[Darkest Daze @ Apr 9th 2008 4:58AM]

So, will we be seeing as many FireWire 1600 devices as we see FireWire 800? They're really going to have to make a huge push to get this to hit mainstream. USB is just so entrenched in the market that I only see this pulling FireWire further off the radar without a lot of behind-the-scenes deals being made.

[eddib @ Apr 9th 2008 5:05AM]

i .. don't know what to buy anymore
will be outdated next month .. and slow

.. help me

[Jeff Lewis @ Apr 9th 2008 6:58AM]

The thing is - it's not about speed, it's about need.

Many geeky types (ie: people who read this site) put a lot of value in "Tool Time" factors: power, speed... being the MOST or BEST in any given factor.

The rest of the world, however, tend to have somewhat different needs and criteria. Most people don't even *have* an external hard drive or any device that can use up the channel capacity of USB2 - even at the '55-65%' of theoretical channel capacity.

Even for those of us with hard drives filling in every port on our system and hubs, it's rare that we need to write so fast that we use up every spare megabit per second the system can eke out.

So, like it or not, USB2 already is more than enough for the vast majority of computer users.

Firewire already lost that battle for a simple, sad reason: Apple got greedy at exactly the wrong time and blew their opportunity for what should be a familar reason: they arrogantly assumed everyone would pick their technology regardless of the cost. They were wrong.

Firewire will probably always be around for things like high speed hard drives and DV, although that may change too. There's a movement to eSATA II at 3Gbps for hard drives, and editing video from your DV camera is kind of stupid. There's no reason not to record the DV stream on the camcorder then just transfer it bulk to the computer (possibly using eSATA II for speed) and process it there as a file rather than process it as a stream over Firewire.

I know in my own case, I have Firewire on my main desktop PC and I never use it.

[tugger @ Apr 9th 2008 9:51AM]

The firewire circuitry is huge, costs more and is therefore more difficult to put into laptops.

Firewire offers much more than firewire, such as easy networking, you can easily boot off a firewire drive (even in windows), genuine daisychaining, and the data moves without tying up the cpu (Unlike all USB formats), and you can raid firewire drives.
If you're just using a printer, you don't need firewire. If you are using USB for moving video or using an external hard drive then you definitely wasted your money.

Horses for courses.

You can use a Lada to pull a caravan, but it's not the best vehicle for the job.

[bobartig @ Apr 9th 2008 5:37PM]

As much as I love firewire, it is all but dead. DV camcorders are coming out that use hard drives and USB2, eSATA enclosures are cheaper than firewire ones and faster for high performance external drives.

I've still got a crapload of firewire enclosures, and will keep using it as long as I can, although it appears that the end could be in sight, now that Apple feels comfortable making computers without it.

[z @ Apr 9th 2008 7:13AM]

Boy is it going to be fun the day wireless emissions are proved to be a health hasard... that's when FW3200 will really take on.

[Angelo @ Apr 9th 2008 8:04AM]

Let's not forget that USB, at least AFAIK right now, uses up CPU power for its processing, so you should, in theory, see a difference in speed from that alone. Also, who the heck wants to be backing up a drive, transferring video, etc., —most likely in the background— and have that tying up CPU power?

I'll stick with the Firewire, which even in its original 400 flavor seems fast.

[Jeremy K. @ Apr 9th 2008 9:55AM]

Does Engadget do ANY proof reading?

DEMOES IS NOT A WORD.

[Mattazuma @ Apr 9th 2008 10:05AM]

Why would anyone go with this for hard drives when 3GB/s E-SATA drives are available now with no price premium over USB2 drives?

[Ubuntu 7.10 WindowsXP @ Apr 9th 2008 10:44AM]

I agree. I think eSATA will crush both USB 3 and Firewire 3200 just because it was out first. By 2010, eSATA has the potential to be market standard. Plus we will most likely be at eSATA 6.0 Gb/s which will destroy both standards in speed.

I have a feeling that soon IDE will be dead, and USB/Firewire will be dying. We will all own motherboards that have 10 SATA ports, 6 eSATA plugs, no IDE connections, 1 USB (legecy at this point), and no Firewire because Apple thinks there stuff is too good for the common man to use. hell even their products lack Firewire ports.

[Zak @ Apr 9th 2008 1:04PM]

All Apple computers have Firewire ports except the MacBook Air. I have nothing against eSATA either, I'm just saying you're wrong about Apple's products not having firewire ports.

[bobartig @ Apr 9th 2008 5:41PM]

When the iPods dropped firewire controllers, it was a nail in the coffin. Mac Book Air with no firewire was another.

What was really great about firewire for iPods was how much juice it delivered, and how fast you could charge the battery.

At one point, I used to fix tons of iPods that had gotten themselves into a bad "totally empty battery" state, such that plugging them into USB didn't do anything. The fix? Plug them into firewire and they jump back to life. This was even for iPods that didn't have firewire controllers. Strange and funny.

[Zak @ Apr 9th 2008 1:32PM]

Since it came up, here's a list of things Firewire does better then eSATA:

Bus powered: eSATA drives require an external power supply. Firewire drives can be bus powered.
Chaining: You can have 63 Firewire devices on a single chain, eSATA has a max of 15.
Cable length: Cable length is restricted to 2M for eSata drives. Firewire 400 is 4.5M, Firewire 800 and 3200 is 100M. Additionally, Firewire 400 cables can be daisy chained up to 72M.
If you need to use an eSATA to SATA passive adapter, max cable length is further reduced to 1M.

So I'm not saying eSATA won't become popular, I'm just saying Firewire does have some significant advantages over it right now in addition to much deeper market penetration, since it's been widely available for about 10 years now.