Could USB ever take over PCI Post: 302867201

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Special Forums Hardware Could USB ever take over PCI Post 302867201 by lupin..the..3rd on Wednesday 23rd of October 2013 04:15:38 PM

10-23-2013

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lost in Cyberia

So if USB is such a mediocre protocol for electricity, transfer rates, and lack of DMA, why/how is it the most universal and popular? Why isn't firewire, or thunderbolt made standard? Proprietary reasons?

Mainly, it's politics.

Yes, Firewire is superior to USB1/2 in every metric; throughput, latency, bus power, number of devices, etc. Plus Firewire is more reliable and compatible than USB, since Firewire devices do not require any drivers to be installed in your OS - USB on the other hand requires drivers for every single USB device.

USB and firewire both came about in the mid 1990's. USB was developed by a consortium led by intel. Firewire was developed by Apple.

For the first iteration of each, they did not compete. USB was only 1.5 Mbits, and Firewire was 400 Mbits. No comparison. USB was purely for keyboards, mice, joysticks, and other low speed devices.

The next iteration of USB, version 2.0, brought a large speed increase, from 1.5 Mbits to 480 Mbits. At first glance, one might think that USB2's 480 Mbits is faster than Firewire's 400 Mbits. Not in the real world however, where Firewire would deliver a sustained 38 MB/s while USB2 could barely manage 30 MB/s.

But back to the reason that USB became ubiquitous, while Firewire was more of a niche product: Politics.

Intel, having played a lead role in the development of USB, had a vested interest in USB's success. So they integrated a USB host controller into every single motherboard chipset. This gave every motherboard out there USB ports as standard, built-in with the motherboard. Firewire on the other hand, required the consumer to add a PCI card to their machine to gain Firewire ports. This immediately gives USB a market penetration advantage.

The second prong of intel's attack was on laptops. Intel added Firewire to laptop chip sets, but did so in a very crippled manner. Instead of using a standard firewire host port, they used a power-less device port. So the mini firewire port you find on many laptops does not provide ANY bus power at all - you're required to use a separete power adapter. Imagine if laptop makers put micro-USB device ports on laptops, and removed the bus power, requiring to plug in a separate A/C adapter to use even a thumb drive! It would be absurd, right? Well that's what they did to cripple Firewire.

So while Firewire is technically superior to USB in every way, intel's politics drove it into a niche role, while the inferior USB became ubiquitous.

Firewire 400 beat USB2 by a large performance margin. Firewire 800 was faster still, delivering triple the real-world performance of USB2. The newly released USB3 however ups the ante. Originally there was talk of Firewire 1600 or Firewire 3200, but that has apparently been scrapped in favor of Thunderbolt.

Personally, the only things I use USB for is keyboard, mouse, and joystick. Everything else is on Firewire 800: DVD burner, hard drives, flat bed scanner, HD Audio mixer, and HD video camera.

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

usba

usba(7D)																  usba(7D)

NAME

       usba, usb - Solaris USB Architecture (USBA)

       USB provides a low-cost means for attaching peripheral devices, including mass-storage devices, keyboards, mice, and printers, to a system.
       For complete information on USB, go to the USB website at http://www.usb.org.

       USBA supports 126 hot-pluggable USB devices per USB bus. The maximum data transfer rate is 1.5 Mbits (low speed USB 1.x) or 12 Mbits  (full
       speed USB 1.x) or 480 MBits (high speed USB 2.0) Mbits per second (Mbps).

       USBA adheres to the Universal Serial Bus 2.0 specification and provides a transport layer abstraction to USB client drivers.

FILES

       Listed below are drivers and modules which either utilize or are utilized by USBA. Drivers in /kernel/drv are 32 bit drivers ( only). Driv-
       ers in /kernel/drv/sparcv9 or /kernel/drv/amd64 are 64 bit drivers.

       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |	   CLIENT DRIVER	    |	      FUNCTION/DEVICE	       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]hid     | HID class 		       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]hubd    | hub class 		       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/ker-				    | mass storage class	       |
       |nel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]scsa2usb    |				       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]usbprn  | printer class		       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]usb_as  | audio streaming class	       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]usb_ac  | audio control class	       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]usb_mid | multi-interface device	       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]usb-    | Edgeport USB to serial port      |
       |ser_edge			    |				       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]ugen    | generic USB driver	       |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]ohci    | open host controller driver      |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]uhci    | universal host controller driver |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9|amd64/]ehci    | enhanced host controller driver  |
       +------------------------------------+----------------------------------+

       +--------------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |    CLIENT STREAMS MODULES	|	FUNCTION/DEVICE       |
       +--------------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |/kernel/strmod/[sparcv9/]usbkbm | Keyboard		      |
       +--------------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |/kernel/strmod/[sparcv9/]usbms	| Mouse 		      |
       +--------------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |/kernel/strmod/[sparcv9/]usb_ah | audio HID		      |
       +--------------------------------+-----------------------------+

       +------------------------------------------+----------------+
       |    HOST CONTROLLER INTERFACE DRIVERS	  |	DEVICE	   |
       +------------------------------------------+----------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9/]ehci		  | Enhanced HCI   |
       +------------------------------------------+----------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9/]ohci		  | Open HCI	   |
       +------------------------------------------+----------------+
       |/kernel/drv/[sparcv9/]uhci		  | Universal HCI  |
       +------------------------------------------+----------------+

       See attributes(5) for a description of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Architecture		     |PCI-based  systems	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWusb			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

       cfgadm_usb(1M), attributes(5),  ehci(7D),  hid(7D),  hubd(7D),  ohci(7D),  scsa2usb(7D),  uhci(7D),  usb_ac(7D),  usb_as(7D),  usb_mid(7D),
       usbprn(7D), usbser_edge(7D), ugen(7D), virtualkm(7D)

       Universal Serial Bus Specification 2.0.

       System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

       http://www.sun.com/io

NOTES

       Booting from USB mass-storage devices is not supported.

       The messages described below may appear on the system console as well as being logged. All  messages are formatted in the following manner:

       WARNING: Error message...

       No driver found for device <device_name> (interface <number> node name=<node_name>)

	   The	installed  Solaris  software  does  not contain a supported driver for this hardware. <number> is the interface number.  <name> is
	   either the device path name or the device name.

       Draining callbacks timed out!

	   An internal error occured.  Please reboot your system.  If this problem persists, contact your system vendor.

								   27 June 2005 							  usba(7D)