Interesting article about Google and h.264

[Peter Korsten]

Op 18-1-2011 1:28, diode schreef:

> Le 17 janv. 2011 � 00:01, Jay Vaughan a �crit :
>
>> a) Power consumption and allocation requires arbitration
>> b) CPU must be involved in transfers
>> c) *Very* PC-specific - device-to-device transfers technically 'not allowed' by the spec
>> d) Has only the 'advantage' that its now become a massively standard peripheral standard
>
> e) USB is very bad at moving packets in time, FW is. It'is only because the bandwidth goes up that it's less visible.

Yeah, but it's comparing apples and oranges, really. For input devices, 
USB is simply great. It's because of Apple's stubbornness that Intel 
figured, hang on, we've got a serial bus right here and most people 
don't care a rat's ass about anything other than a master-slave 
connection. And USB is superior to the plethora of parallel and serial 
interfaces (anybody remember connecting a mouse with a DB25 connector?) 
that it replaced.

So USB was put beyond its intended target range of devices, but 
economically, it all makes sense: backwards compatible, industry 
standard, etc.

> Now why Apple has been so stupid about promoting it is beyond me.

Because Apples loves control and its intellectual property.

> On the lack of USB3 in Apple hardware for now, is because I think (and I'm not alone) they are planning to jump to (copper)lightpeak instead. And to be a little bit serious, most people don't need these levels of speed for day to day job, as video pro are.
>
> eSATA is very good at handling drives, but it's about a little more here.

Hmm. Wikipedia has the following to say:

"In January 2011, Intel announced that the first Light Peak 
implementations would not be fibre optic but strictly copper based. No 
speeds were claimed but commentators judged that performance of Copper 
Peak would not exceed that of USB3 or SATA 6Gb by enough to justify such 
a drastic shift in protocol and interface."

So why bother?

- Peter