On: USB4 Specification

[simias]

Can you expand on that? IIRC it's not that simple, there are trade-offs for both solutions. Quoting wikipedia's Firewire article:

>USB requires the presence of a bus master, typically a PC, which connects point to point with the USB slave. This allows for simpler (and lower-cost) peripherals, at the cost of lowered functionality of the bus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Comparison_with_USB

[m463 → simias]

In the beginning, USB1/2 vs Firewire was a much clearer comparison.

Firewire could power a 2.5" spinning hard disk. (usb could not provide enough power)

You could hook two macs together with firewire, and turn one into a hard disk via target disk mode. (peer to peer)

Firewire could transfer video from cameras without dropping frames. (guaranteed bandwidth)

On the other hand, USB was always the cost king.

I believe there was a $1/chip royalty for firewire, and that limited its growth.

USB in practical terms has caught up.

[magduf → m463]

The other difference was the Firewire did a lot more in that chip, basically offloading a lot of work from the CPU, so it was higher-performing and lower CPU usage.

USB was made mostly by Intel, and they intentionally made it "dumb" so that the CPU had more work to do, in order to push high-performance CPU chips. But of course, the big factor was that license cost, which made Firewire devices cost more, whereas USB was very cheap to implement.