According to the IEEE 1394 Website:
The 1394-2008 standard updates and revises all prior 1394 standards, including 1394a™, 1394b™, 1394c™, enhanced UTP, and the 1394 beta plus PHY-Link interface. It also incorporates the complete specifications for S1600 (1.6 Gigabit/second bandwidth) and for S3200, which provides 3.2 Gigabit/second speeds.
The standard is expected to be available this October.
This is pretty rockin’ news, not only will this allow them to compete with the upcoming USB 3.0 standard, it gives creative professionals a whole lot more bandwidth to use for their applications. I have always preferred firewire over USB due to the fact it does not bog your CPU and Memory down while in use, (not like USB at least) I remember when USB mice first hit the scene, and if you were a gamer you popped a PS2 adapter on that bad boy, because if you were trying to frag in a fast paced FPS, your mouse would give you LAG!! Never the case with Firewire, at least in my experience. I even still have my 4th geh iPod, and it still works and syncs faster than anyone elses and why? Its on firewire baby! It was also the last iPod to really be able to be used to boot an OS off of, with any type of speed.
I love firewire for my video camcorders, audio equipement and iPod. This also means that firewire networking at home may make a comeback, or allow people to set up their own pseudo-fiber channel Beowolf clusters at home since it this will beat gigabit lan and be cheaper than most of the available cards on the market for the ethernet standard that would handle their own traffic (such as the Killer Nic from BigFootNetworks.com.
Regardless of what side of the fence you are sitting on this year, its an exciting year for tech and connection standards.
Check out some further reading over at ArsTechnica.com, GizModo.com, and TGDaily at Tomshardware.com.
