Clash of the Titans Over USB 3.0 Specification Process

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."

1394 For Life

Ever the more reason to never give up Firewire until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Re:1394 For Life

Ever the more reason to never give up Firewire until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

But why does everything with firewire have to cost an extra $30 or so?

Re:1394 For Life

Because it was designed by Apple.

Re:1394 For Life

IIRC, Firewire controllers need to be smarter than USB controllers because they might not be hooked up to a PC. For instance, your video camera might go straight to a recording deck, or some other electronic doodad. So the firewire controllers were designed to offload a lot more of the protocol to move stuff around, which made it easier to design systems. Of course this was done back before embedded controllers running Linux (and its USB stack) became cheap as dirt.

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.

Re:1394 For Life

FireWire requires an actual IO controller, where USB 2 relies on the CPU and the driver.

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.

Not quite true about the cost.

Firewire might pay for itself in high speed applications where time == money, but it is sever overkill (and too high cost) for many lower speed applications such as mouse, keyboard etc. USB is king of the low speed domain because of low cost: a USB-cappable microcontroller only costs a couple of bucks and a sub dollar micro can do a low speed bit-banged implementation of USB. Adding USB to peripherals is almost free.

Re:1394 For Life

You're wrong. You are basically remembering something that's been fixed and settled a decade ago. Good job on being out of date by a decade.

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.

Re:1394 For Life

Good idea! Maybe we should look at having some kind of "Universal Serial Bus" that everybody can use as a standard!

Re:1394 For Life

The big problem with using firewire for everything is it lacks the lower speed modes that USB has. That means that every perhipheral has to have chips capable of handling a 400 megabit per second interface even if it doesn't need anywhere near that ammount of bandwidth.

Re:1394 For Life

There is no shortage of people willing to beat a dead horse.

Re:1394 For Life

How is this modded interesting, all the geeks know that FW 400 is still faster than USB 2.0 because 480mbps is theoretical and not an actual constant transfer speed like with FW400. Firewire is processor independent as well since it has its own controller whereas the main CPU is used to control USB 2, that means its transfer rate is dependent on system performance. Everything else in your post isn't bollocks though.

Re:1394 For Life

Great way to stay on the sidelines of understanding. Yes, USB 2.0 is "faster" than Firewire on paper. However, 2.0's max/burst speed of 480Mbit/s is very different from it's average speed (about 240Mbit/s), and substantially lower than Firewire's sustained speed. It's a side effect of something that relies on the host to do the heavy lifting vs a device that handles it's own heavy lifting. Not looking forward to similar crap with USB 3.0, not to mention the continuance of shitastic driver support I've always seen from USB vs Firewire.

Re:1394 For Life

If someone has physical access to your computer then it is already game over*.

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.

Re:1394 For Life

I've not heard of USB missile launchers either. It shoots USBs?

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.

Re:1394 For Life

I've not heard of USB missile launchers either. It shoots USBs?

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/ [thinkgeek.com]

Re:1394 For Life

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.

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...

Re:1394 For Life

Firewire is not designed to run peripherals. It's designed for high speed, efficient transfer of data. The closest it gets to peripherals is high end scanners. Mice, printers, keyboards, basically anything human interface is more appropriate for USB. Universal Serial Bus. Firewire is not universal. The overhead created by being universal makes even the high speed USB (480) transfer data slower than Firewire 400. Then there's Firewire 800 which leaves USB in the dust nicely on file transfers.

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.

So...

So will this mean in the end we will have 2 competing USB standards? USB-Intel and USB-AMD? I can only hope that one will get picked over the other before it appears in most products because after the whole HD-DVD and Blu-Ray thing it would be an absolute pain to get a computer with USB-Intel in it when all the products will be USB-AMD.

Not competing standard, competing hardware designs

This isn't about competing USB 3 standards -- the spec is being designed by a group, and there is only one. This is about the design of the hardware used to implement a host controller that can comply with the spec. This is something that any company can develop if they want to, but since Intel is going to license their design of the host controller for free, most companies will just wait for that design and use it to implement USB 3.

Re:Betamax theory of CE

Sooo...you're still waiting for HD-DVD to win?

Re:Betamax theory of CE

Sooo...you're still waiting for HD-DVD to win?

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.

Re:So...

All other things being equal (no major bugs in one of the specs), USB-Intel would be the clear winner if the two standards came out about the same time, due to Intel's influence, name recognition, prestige, etc. The 5000 pound gorilla flattens the 200 pound monkey with 1 step.

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.)

Bastard companies

As we have seen with wireless networking gear in the past companies are all too eager to screw the consumer with incompatibilities because of pre-spec products being released. If Intel was doing this I would say good for them, its rare a company would actively try to protect the consumer from these vultures.

This is only a concern to driver writers

This is a replay of the OHCI/UHCI host controller interface standards of original USB.
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....

Re:Non-skewed article how?

I agree... the battle just heating up, how can you be biased? Not until there are two definitive sides can you get behind one or the other.

This does point out one thing, there is a lot to be said for open standards ... even if some of them have been OOXML'd lately. (that's not even valid in Roman Numerals)

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.