Thunderbolt vs. SuperSpeed USB 327
Lucas123 writes "When it comes to performance, power and size, external I/O interconnect Thunderbolt handily beats SuperSpeed USB, but in the one critical category — ubiquity — it has an almost impossible uphill battle. Thunderbolt has a maximum 10Gbps signaling rate to SuperSpeed USB's 6Gbps and it offers more than twice the power to devices. To date, however, Apple is the only systems manufacturer to adopt Thunderbolt, and it has done so as an additional device connectivity port, keeping SuperSpeed USB on its computers. No other systems manufacturer has committed to Thunderbolt. In contrast, SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, with numbers continuing to grow."
Re:TFA (-1, wrong) (Score:2, Informative)
Additionally, Sony also has started releasing laptops with athunderbolt, even though with their own connector based off of the USB plug.
The article is simply wrong.
TFA (-2, wrong) (Score:3, Informative)
Also, Apple has not have SuperSpeed USB on any of it's computers.
Apple doesn't offer USB 3.0 (Score:2, Informative)
Huh? When did Apple start offering USB 3.0? AFAIK they're still shipping USB 2.0 only.
Re:Firewire (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, how many points wrong can you get...
Actually I give up, you have so much wrong about firewire that it's pointless to correct you point for point...
The reason Firewire is more expensive is that it's a system that requires some processing on both sides, any device that plugs into firewire has to have sufficient smarts to know what it needs in order to operate, USB on the other hand is a dumb protocol, all the processing is handled on the Host (PC) side, and all the devices plugged into it need very little smarts, this directly effects chip/design costs of peripherals. Firewire was actually designed with the concept that a scanner with a firewire port and a printer with a firewire port could be connected together and pictures printed without using computer resources.
USB also has the limitation of regimented and inflexible bandwidth (at least as of USBv2, v3 might change that). Which means while USB 2 may have 480mb of 'bandwidth' only a small chunk of that is usable by any one device, Firewire however is flexible, not only can it portion the bandwidth to the devices need but it can also use "Isochronous" (regular dedicated) bandwidth, allowing high-priority/bandwidth systems to transfer information, such as video/audio streams and critical systems (some internal aircraft systems use 1394 bus).
You want lots of high-speed external storage access, check some benchmarks, firewire will beat out USB for real-world performance, even though they are fairly matched just reading spec numbers.
Firewire is both faster and better than USB, however it's more expensive in both hardware and design/implementation, which is why USB has won that fight, the majority of people are all about cheep, not better.