Clash of the Titans Over USB 3.0 Specification Process 269
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Non-scewed article how? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bastard companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:2, Insightful)
1394 = quality technology
OHCI vs UHCI Part II: History repeats itself (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
- all things being equal, USB-Intel would lose, look at the companies opposing it, you have AMD, Intel's biggest rival in chipsets, you have nVidia, the biggest gfx company, you have VIA and SiS - who handle pretty much every other chip in your computer.
In short, every chip in your computer except your intel chip would be specced to the disputing standard, what would Intel do to counter that? Personally try to take over the gfx market, the VIA market (I say that because it pretty much is VIA's monopoly)?
Don't get me wrong, Intel is powerful - but they haven't been the 5000 pound gorilla in a couple decades. I mean, Microsoft rose against Intel - that was decades ago. If you talk to most casual gamers nowadays I'd say they're more likely to recognize nVidia than Intel.
It's pretty much impossible for Intel to pull what you suggest off, if nVidia and AMD/ATi oppose them together that would kill off Intel in pretty much any non-linux computer. I mean, granted Intel does like linux, but I don't think they're willing to suicide their MS market over a USB standard.
Also, saying there is no significant use for speeds above 2.0 is retarded, I'm sorry because I don't want to resort to personal attacks - but seriously - 2.0 isn't very fast in all honesty, to think that 2.0 is where tech is going to level off is (again) retarded.
Re:Mod parent troll... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is only a concern to driver writers (Score:2, Insightful)
Though I'm sure Denon will be the first to come out with a super USB 3.0 optical cable for the bargain price of $750 as an upgrade to their $500 Ethernet cable [slashdot.org] which seems to have an issue with clearly transmitting the frequencies that dogs hear.
So hopefully in a year or two Fido can enjoy every nuance of crashing cymbals in music and the always interesting noises that didn't get filtered out in the studio, even if I can't.
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.
Re:1394 For Life (Score:3, Insightful)
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.)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:1394 For Life (Score:1, Insightful)
Flash drives (and iPods) don't come close to saturating USB2, so what would be the point of using firewire?
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.
Re:Non-scewed article how? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:3, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Not quite true about the cost. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1394 For Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course not. But be honest. How often is that a critical requirement? Like I said, Firewire has been relegated
Firewire may be able to guarantee 400Mbit/s, but that's not much of an advantage when Ethernet can provide nearly 1000Mbit/s.
Jitter, packet loss, et al., are non-sequiters. They are already handled appropriately and reliably. Collisions are a thing of the past, you can't even find gigabit hubs.
Latency/isochronous transfer is an issue to ONLY a small bit of studio equipment... Which is where Firewire has been relegated to. And with such a small niche, it may go out of fashion there in short order, as other protocols that have better penetration get slightly expanded to eat away at that niche. eg. HDMI, SDI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.
DV cameras could benefit greatly from the faster-than-realtime transfer that ethernet offers and seem likely to switch away from Firewire in the near future. Eliminating the fixed-data rate realtime transfer would also allow for the use of much better (VBR) compression, with the potential for higher capacity on the same media, and longer battery life as well.