TG Daily reports the IEEE has approved a new specification that will give FireWire a bandwidth of up to 3.2Gb/s (400MB/s) in October.
Most IEEE 1394 devices are still running on the S400 (400 Mb/s) specification despite the fact that S800 (800 Mb/s) was introduced with the IEEE 1394b spec in 2003. The problem with this spec was a different connector than the design that was used for S400. However, bilingual cables that are compatible with S400 and S800 ports are available.
The IEEE today announced that it formally approved the IEEE 1394-2008 spec, which will introduce support for S1600 (1.6 Gb/s) and S3200 (3.2 Gb/s) while offering full backwards compatibility with S400 and S800 ports. Down the road, it is expected that IEEE 1394 will scale up to 6.4 Gb/s.
Next year USB 3.0 will be introduced and that interface will offer a bandwidth of 4.8Gb/s (600MB/s).
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