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Comment by hop | Hacker News Reader

USB2 and FireWire were close to the same speed. Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3 and can push DisplayPorts, so I doubt it will be the same.

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Yes, but

1) USB3 has a 1 year lead - check out how many products are out already

2) 5Gbps vs 10Gbps. There are just a couple of SSDs that need SATA III (6Gbps) because the 3Gbps isn't enough. You just don't need the speed for disk I/O. What for then? Current DisplayPorts 1.2 has 17Gbps so I don't really see the Thunderbolt replacing it.

also Firewire 800 was substantially faster in theoretical and particularly in practical throughput

Firewire was 400MBits for 5 years before USB2 was released (USB1 was only 12MBits). Look who won that one.

IIRC, it was because Intel made USB chipsets really cheap vs IEEE1394a (aka FireWire) chipsets.

I recall it being because Apple screwed up the licensing so bad ($1 per port) that everyone got together to create and then push USB 2.0 as a replacement even after the royalties got reduced to something semi-reasonable like 25c per device.

I worked at a place that developed FireWire peripherals. I can tell you the $1/port price never mattered to us, despite the loud backlash on the internet.

The real reason USB "won" is because Intel really pushed it and integrated it into every one of their chipsets. Possibly even licensing it to the other PC chipset makers for cheap/free up front.

Given that Intel is backing Thunderbolt, it stands a good chance at achieving the same widespread usage.

USB can easily be emulated and done using just the CPU, no chips required while Firewire required a real chip that did the negotiation and sat directly on the memory bus for DMA.

I don't care who won, I like my FireWire CF card reader.

Right up until you have nothing to plug it into.

He can plug it into the new Thunderbolt plug with a simple adapter. Thunderbolt is already compatible with USB and Firewire.

It sounds like Thunderbolt is "compatible" with USB and Firewire in the same way ExpressCard and CardBus are -- by putting the host controller that would normally be on a PCI/PCIe card on the bus.

1) true 2) true, but keep in mind that this bandwidth is shared by the entire bus.

#2 is classic technology short-sightedness. How many times have people said that a 100 GB Hard Drive, 2 GB RAM, etc. is more than sufficient?

I disagree. He's just saying that the speed difference doesn't currently matter, not that it never will. The battle for adoption is fought based on today's usefulness, not tomorrow's (in most cases).

I have maybe 20 products at home that plug into my USB 3 ports.

I don't have anything that plugs into thunderbolt.

I couldn't and wouldn't buy a computer without USB. I can live without Thunderbolt.

Re #2: higher performance external video cards (think 3D accelerator dongles for laptops), cluster interconnects, RAID arrays of SSDs, RAM-based "disks" for use as another layer of cache, lower-latency ultra-high-channel-count external sound cards, etc.

Doesn't USB rely on the CPU and FireWire offloads processing to a dedicated chip?

Does anyone know if Thunderbolt is similar to FireWire in this way?

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