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Clash of the Titans Over USB 3.0 Specification Process
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:50 PM
from the so-you'd-cut-this-giant-electronic-baby-in-half dept.
from the so-you'd-cut-this-giant-electronic-baby-in-half dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Nvidia and other chip designers are accusing Intel of 'illegally restraining trade' in a dispute over the USB 3.0 specification. The dispute has prompted Nvidia, AMD, Via, and SiS to establish a rival standard for the USB 3.0 host controller. An Intel spokesman denies the company is making the USB specification, or that USB 3.0 'borrows technology heavily' from the PCI Special Interests group. He does, however, say that Intel won't release an unfinished Intel host controller spec until it's ready, as it would lead to incompatible hardware."
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1394 For Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Informative)
Firewire's main advantage now is the fact that it is a point to point mechanism, not a bus. USB suffers because every so often the host must interrupt things to discover new devices. This can slow down large block transfers quite a bit.
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Informative)
The thing that does have a big impact is using 12 mbps or 1.5 mbps devices in a way that they hog the bus. Ideally, all non-high-speed transfers would be converted to 480 mbps.
You might imagine a motherboard with 10 USB ports could communicate with all 10 independently. But that is rarely the case. Usually they all share the same bandwidth. You might expect there would be buffering for 12 and 1.5 mbps transfers, so they wouldn't hog the bus from the other 9 boths. That too is rarely the case.
USB 2.0 hubs do buffer and convert 12 and 1.5 mbps transfers to 480 mbps. Again, you might expect a 4 port hub to properly allow 4 slow devices to share. That is sometimes the case. Better hubs have multi-TT (transaction translators, basically the USB term for a buffer). But many hubs have only a single TT, which means only one downstream 12 mbps or 1.5 mbps device can talk at once, and any others on that hub must wait until the single buffer is available.
If the USB 2.0 spec had required all hubs to include a TT on every downstream port, and had the "root hub" (on the motherboard which provides many ports with shared bandwidth) been required to implement TTs on every port, there would have been much higher levels of satisfaction with USB 2.0.
The when Compaq, HP, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, NEC and Philips wrote the USB 2.0 spec, they apparently believed 480 mbps speed would soon replace 12 mbps in most devices. Requiring many TTs probably seems excessively costly to support legacy devices that would soon become obsolete. What instead happened is only certain devices requiring high speed implemented 480 mbps. Almost all others stayed at 12 mbps. Most devices that implement 12 mbps use a 48 MHz clock internally, and many low-cost silicon fabs really only supports clocks to about 60-100 MHz (especially if the chip's fab supports the extra polysilicon layers for implementing flash or eeprom).
Let's hope they learn their lesson and require TTs in ALL cases where 480, 12 and 1.5 mbps devices could share the upstream bandwidth, especially on motherboards. If they do, USB 3.0 will probably be very nice, providing so much more shared bandwidth than necessary that hardly anybody will care if it's shared. But if they skimp and allow any sharing, anywhere, without TTs - the result will probably be a lot like USB 2.0 - very fast, but sometimes you plug in another device and all of a sudden it sucks.
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Informative)
In short -- FireWire is faster and requires far less load on the target machine. The downside is the initial cost is higher. I find it pays for itself pretty quick.
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Not quite true about the cost. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Informative)
The entire royalty is something like $0.25 per device, Apple only gets a portion of that.
The cost is in the smarts, each device requires a more complicated controller and an additional chip.
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Look on it from the bright side, a few years from now you and your likes will claim how Apple popularized USB3. If it weren't for Apple we would still be using low speed Firewire and so on. Great, isn't it.
Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Interesting)
Think a 6 port firewire-hub. That's $6 just in royalty.
But I don't think they actually charged that much. Wasn't it more along the lines of $0.25 per device?
The biggest reason why USB was a really slow hit with the x86-crowd was the lack of USB-support in MS-Windows and other x86 OS's. In order to connect a USB-device you had to install USB-support, reboot, install the device drivers, reboot, sometimes there would be another driver to be loaded after the first one (sic) so another install, reboot...
Also, some early USB equipped x86-mainboards didn't have USB support in BIOS, so you couldn't use a USB-keyboard to change BIOS-settings, enter Windows safe-mode, etc, etc.
USB was also slow as hell for most other uses than HID-devices or printers.
My first mp3-player would take more than an hour to fill. 6GB @ 12Mbps, the horror!
When Apple put a port in their hardware, they usually already got the drivers ready and they rely mostly on making their own hardware.
The Imac came with a USB-keyboard and USB-mouse made by Apple, and thus everyone that had an Imac used USB-gear.
What has MS license cost or Microsoft's greed got to do with firewire royalty and Apple's greed?
They're not connected. Don't confuse subjects.
If anyone accuses Apple of greed, that doesn't mean that they think Apple is worse than Microsoft. Both are greedy. Microsoft more than Apple usually though.
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Insightful)
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USB2 is _not_ faster than firewire... (Score:4, Insightful)
USB2 is quoted as having 480Mbps throughput, however as the grandparent points out USB2 is not a fully-fledged I/O controller just the PHY layer, the host having to do all the heavy lifting.
The upshot is that when you actually use one bus or the other to, say copy files, firewire at a mere 400Mbps trounces USB2 in throughput.
Yes USB3 is in the pipe with vastly improved on paper specs, but then again Firewire has 3200 and 6400 variants in the pipe as well.
Essentially USB should have been left as an interface for keyboards and mice, and firewire aught to have been adopted by intel as the preferred bus for all high throughput applications, it would also have been preferable to SATA.
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bother using firewire hacking when it is much simpler to do a hard reset and load a bootable CD?
*YMMV, See TrueCrypt for example.
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Admit it, once you have access to the computer, it's game over. Unless you encrypt the hard drive. The whole thing. And your RAM as well. And use EFI. Encrypted...
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Interesting)
True, there is no HID standard for Firewire. But that's not its strength. Firewire's strength is USB's weakness, and Firewire's weakness is USB's strength.
Firewire seems to be fading into smaller niches though. I don't want to daisy chain hard drives, so eSATA will do fine, and eSATA does allow the use of port multipliers, one port still does five drives.
I have two HDV cameras, but I don't use them much, I prefer an HF10 which writes to SDHC cards. Firewire is good for audio tasks, which I don't do.
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not USB2 or SATA that cannibalized Firewire's supposed market... It's Ethernet.
Much better range, lower price, more devices, equally high speed, similar (controller) requirements, easier device sharing, etc.
High-end printers, scanners, CD/DVD duplicators, studio (audio/video) equipment, hard drive arrays, etc. They all have gigabit ethernet connectors now.
Ethernet ate the high-end, USB ate the low-end, Firewire got left out in the cold, with just a few niche applications where Ethernet is inconvenient and its benefits don't apply, and yet USB isn't quite fast/flexible enough. That basically means just digital camcorders, and a handful of studio equipment...
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So...with USB 3 we have a case of extending USB into areas which it wasn't really meant to serve...and which already are served very well.
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Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Also firewire IO is done on the card/chip, whereas USB is done to a large degree by the CPU. This is why we saw recent threads about the 'security risk' associated with jacking into the firewire port of a computer - you have direct access to system memory on most systems. Try a file copy with USB 2, and again with firewire, watch your processor. BIG difference. This is important when you are processing video, you can't have your video IO making your video processing lag and skip frames. That's one of the reasons firewire remains dominant on video.
The only aspect of this I find puzzling is the scarcity and cost of firewire flash drives. kanguru makes them but they cost 3-4x as much as comparable USB thumb drives. Best guess here is thumb drives started their boon before most PCs had firewire ports, so they were just trying to hit the largest market, which lacked firewire, and so now we're stuck with it.
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So... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Betamax theory of CE (Score:3)
Once again, we'll have the VHS version and the Betamax version.
One will win. Avoid whichever one Sony gets behind.
Re:Betamax theory of CE (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Betamax theory of CE (Score:5, Insightful)
This one's not over yet. Apparently online distribution was a third contender waiting in the wings. We shall see. Sony bought out HD-DVD. They can't buy out online distribution. In the meantime BD players and discs have gone up in price not down. That was a critical mistake.
Sony has some of the most brilliant engineers on earth. They're chained to the marketing team from hell. They always try to exploit their market share before it's time. A shame, really. They do a host other things wrong too. If it weren't so their supercomputer class gaming console [wired.com] would not be coming in third to the XBox and the Wii. They could use a consultant to come in and tell them how retarded their marketing team is, but they have too much pride to win. Surely I'm not the only one who sees this.
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Not competing standard, competing hardware designs (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
But according to the USB spec both behaviours are correct since the device can't make any assumptions about what overheads exist on the host.
I can't find the reference to device visible differences between UHCI and OHIC and in any case it was a very rare case. I did find this presentation by Intel that shows OHCI and UHCI performing almost identically despite the fact that OHCI controllers basically do the USB protocol in software and UHCI is just a bus master DMA engine attached to a serial interface with the protocol is done in software.
http://www.usb.org/developers/presentations/pres0598/bulkperf.ppt [usb.org]
With USB 2.0 there was a push to a unified host controller spec called EHCI. From what I can tell this spat means that there will possibly be two rival host controller specs because Intel haven't published their spec in time for other people to implement it. But I don't think that will fork the wire protocol, I think it just means that OSs will need to have two new host controller like USB 1.0 drivers rather than one like USB 2.0.
You could argue that UHCI was a good thing since it uses less hardware and performs about the same.
Incidentally Wikipedia writes this up based on the "Good open standards vs vile proprietary standards" meme, which seems a bit unfair. Both OHCI and UHCI are based on published specifications which are freely available. I don't know if you need to pay a license fee to implement either or both of them - I actually think you don't since USB was successful because you didn't need to pay a per port fee when it was introduced, unlike Firewire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OHCI [wikipedia.org]
The difference seems to me more like a software engineer view (Microsoft want to do it all in hardware like OHCI) of the world vs a hardware engineer view of the world (Intel say do it all in software with UHCI)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you mean like Intel won over AMD with their attempt at a 64 bit processor instruction set?
(In case you don't know: They did absolutely not. Intel had to scrap their 64 bit processor because nobody wanted it, and today's Intel 64 bit processors uses AMD's instruction set.)
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Bastard companies (Score:4, Insightful)
This is only a concern to driver writers (Score:5, Informative)
This does NOT at all effect users, only driver writers.
What is being forked is the USB driver interface, and does not effect device compatibility at all.
As mentioned above, there were two driver interfaces for the original USB standard, and the only people who knew were driver writers and nerds compiling their own custom kernel.
This is blown way out of proportion, and doesn't effect 99.999% of us. Nothing to see here, move along....
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It is not in the interests of the consumer nor of the standard to have multiple host-controller interfaces. You may care to muse on why it might be in Intel's interests to the detriment of all others.
By the sounds of things: Both Right, Easy Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
nVidia has a point: Intel not telling anyone else until the last moment would, indeed, give Intel an unfair first mover advantage.
Obvious solution: Release the pre and post release specs with an agreement attached that anyone wanting a copy has to sign. An amount of time that gives everyone a fair chance to get product ready is picked after final specs are chosen. Anyone gaining access to the specs agrees not to release until that time period has passed. Now no one releases incompatible hardware and no one gets an unfair first mover advantage.
I've got an idea (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Non-skewed article how? (Score:4, Funny)
This does point out one thing, there is a lot to be said for open standards
No matter which version is better technically, if there is one that is not backwards compatible they will have an uphill slog trying to sell it. Yeah, I know, CDs were not backwards compatible with floppy drives, but this is a bit different. If the connector is the same, it MUST be compatible or my aunt nelly will kill someone.
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"there is a lot to be said for open standards"... Yes, Something indeed. Who lead the CD revolution? Sony. Who developed the standard? Sony (and Phillips). They released the standard after they had working products to sell. The "standard" still then cost a lot of money to even look at. (See the wikipedia article on the Red Book standard).
My Point (finally?): Giving the ex
Re:Non-skewed article how? (Score:4, Interesting)
We can detail the lawsuits ad nausea, but my point is that anyone that was a healthy partner with MS has done to their industry what MS did to software. Like that or not, it is true. In the end, we have Mr Gates to thank for this, no matter how philanthropic he may try to be these days. I wonder sometimes how far exactly he has set the human race back from what will eventually, and necessarily be.
Though that is sort of scifi philosophy, it is true. In the name of riches, the advancement of technology has been slowed, deliberately, and with malicious intent against the betterment of mankind. In this way, I find his generosity a bit pale these days.
Open standards are indeed the ONLY way to create technology and advancement that will last and actually advance mankind in a direction that betters all of us. Despite the socialist sounding tone of that, it is true. We are all better for the sharing of technology from the space race. Technology, and specifically computing/networks are still in the hands of those that would derail it's benefits if there is profit in it. There are those that are trying to change this situation, but it is slow going. Even hardware manufacturers are hobbled by things like the DMCA and it's ilk around the world. Sometimes I'm sad to say I'm American.
Fighting against the 'right thing to do' for the sake of money is not in the best interests of the community, and in the end, it hurts your business. Customer is king, so they say, and when you put hurdles in the way of a complete and exemplary experience by the end user, you harm your business in some way, if not in big ways. It's unfortunate that not enough people will understand that the competitions in the technology markets have hurt them, and they will not understand how to express their frustration that older USB devices won't work with new USB hosts. It will be just one more black magic thing they don't understand about technology type things. They will go to PCs R Us and buy whatever the best they can get happens to be, hoping that it works for a couple of years, not unlike car buyers. So for profits, businesses promote the throw-away society. When there is something new, throw the old away, don't upgrade, don't re-use. How is this helpful to the human race?
Well, just some late night thoughts about this whole thing, and the absolutely ignorant waste it makes of the world.
BTW, there is hardware space competition.... if you are willing to build your own and not buy what the idiot^H^H^H^H^H salesman tells you at worstbuy.
sigh
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