New FireWire spec announced.
The IEEE has approved an updated version of the standard IEEE 1394 known to Apple users as Firewire. The standard has been named 1394-2008 and is backwards compatible with all prior Firewire technology. The new standard includes complete specifications for speeds of 1.6 Gigabits/second and 3.2 Gigabits/second. It utilizes the existing Firewire 800 connector.
Firewire 400 devices have become widely adopted, though the faster Firewire 800 has seen slower to see wide spread use outside the Mac community. It will be interesting to see how quickly this technology will be adopted. We talked to several hard disk vendors and they say it is on their road map, so we may see some products using the spec early next year. When we contacted Apple about including it on future Macs they said they do not comment of future product releases. But I guess we expected that.
IEEE says the new standard is expected to be available in October.
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