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03 Jul 2007
The IEEE 1394 interface, also called FireWire or i.Link, is facing a slow lingering death as its market share stagnates, experts warned today.
Analyst firm In-Stat said that the peak year for IEEE 1394 devices is expected to be 2008, at which point the technology will suffer "major challenges" and a slow decline that will set in during 2009.
Further reading
The interface is a high-speed serial bus specification found primarily in PCs, PC peripherals and consumer electronics.
"IEEE 1394 suffers from being the second-choice technology in many product segments," said In-Stat analyst Brian O'Rourke.
"For example, IEEE 1394's historic one-third penetration of the PC market is now dwarfed by high-speed USB's 100 per cent. This has helped high-speed USB become the interface of choice for PC peripherals."
Recent In-Stat research suggests that IEEE 1394-enabled device shipments will grow by only 0.2 per cent annually through 2011.
IEEE 1394's use in digital camcorders, for example, fell from 85 per cent in 2005 to 77 per cent in 2006.
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heard it before
betamax anyone ?
Posted by: Ian 08 Jul 2007
Firewire beats USB but ESATA beats Firewire.
Firewire 400 is near ubiquitous in consumer / prosumer mini-DV camcorders. Firewire 800 is more rare on host systems. USB is everywhere, but is not efficient because of the small packets and high cpu overhead. So Firewire is technologically superior over USB for external storage. HOWEVER, SATA and ESATA far outclass Firewire for connecting hard drives and arrays. Since SATA150 and SATA300 are widespread (almost all modern PC motherboards or addin cards) and has a roadmap to SATA600 and beyond, Firewire can't compete. High end professionals should be looking at Fiber channel SAN storage, which leaves Firewire increasingly marginalised into the niche it does well in: Firewire400 for DV camcorders and consumer editing. Firewire800 never really took off in mass markets and is unlikely to increase market share because of competition from better technologies.
Posted by: Peter Nelson 07 Jul 2007
Not bloody likely...
The fact of the matter is that repeated testing of throughput puts USB an astonishing 65% to 70% slower than Firewire in crucial applications such as video and audio transfer, not to mention RAID drive setups. This is because the nature of USB involves the computer acting as a "Master" device, constantly relaying instructions to the "Slave" USB device, while Firewire devices have intelligent peer-to-peer connections, usually offering close to 100% throughput.
Posted by: Mister Ron 05 Jul 2007
Maybe for lame PC users
FireWire is far superior for high performance external hard drives. High end consumer audio and video uses it as well. The percentage loss in digital camcorder is because of the new hard drive and DVD based products favored by the lower end. Professionals and pro-sumers will continue to use tape based solutions with FireWire to edit their videos on a computer, most likely to be a Macintosh.
Posted by: Bradley Dichter 03 Jul 2007