FireWire is Back to Take on USB 3.0

The battle between USB and FireWire may not be over just yet. IEEE has recently approved 1394-2008, a faster version of the standard widely known as FireWire. The combined amendments, enhancements and more than 100 errata now increase the bandwidth of the twelve year-old interface to 3.2Gbit/s, dubbed as S3200. At the same time, the group also gave the green light to S1600 which offers 1.6Gbit/s.

The good news is that the new standard will reuse existing 9-pin FireWire 800 connectors; this should be a relief for those concerning incompatibility issue. USB 3.0, on the other hand, calls for completely different cabling to accommodate optical in addition to copper wiring. 1394-2008 and USB 3.0 will be the first version of their respective interfaces to break the gigabit mark. USB 3.0 (aka. SuperSpeed USB) will be making a tenfold increase to 4.8Gbit/s whereas its nemesis FireWire will quadruple its bandwidth to 3.2Gbit/s.

Before long, 12x Blu-ray recorders will certainly exceed the capability of USB 2.0; 128GB flash drives will take a full hour to fill up; and even USB monitors will still be as laggy as the day they came out. So yea... we badly need multi-gigabit connection.