11 Jul
2010
11 Jul
'10
6:41 p.m.
Hi,
On Saturday 10 July 2010 23:16:40 Harry Van Haaren wrote:
Advantages of firewire approach:
1. Bus design. Internally, the firewire chip doesnt have to ask the CPU to
copy data
to its port, it just does it, while USB devices use the CPU for this task.
2. On cheap laptops (and unfortunat others) the IRQ's between USB &
something else
collide. This means worse performance. (I'm aware that Firewire IRQ's can
collide too,
but I've never seen that phenomena before.)
3. Firewire daisy chaining does still exist, at least for the Echo
Audiofire devices that I have.
4. I run a laptop (so PCI / PCI-E and a lot of other options are out. )
5. From my experiences, Firewire devices seem to be more geared towards
professional use,
while USB targets the "pro-sumer" market. (No flame bait intended here..)
Here are more firewire-advantages:
6. Synchronous transport for streaming data. Also streaming stuff is initiated
by the device, not by the cpu.
6.5 This results in a bus-wide clock to sync devices which enables the daisy-
chain usage of multiple devices.
7. Guaranteed bandwidth and latency (up to a certain maximum), devices will
not steal each others time as with usb.
The IRQ-problems applies to all pci, usb and firewire the same. If the
interrupts collide and you can't change them, it will not work...
Have fun,
Arnold