What is the future of I/O?

And will we see it in 2002 macs?

Some of you know that I think Apple ought to make a headless micro-tower iMac. 1 PCI slot and 1 AGP slot for sound and video cards is a must for a consumer machine that wishes to woo windows customers. OR, so I thought, but what if Firewire got a whole lot faster?

Not 400Mbps but 800-1600Mbps, or even 3.2Gbps? Would this be fast enough to enable the firwire bus to effectively replace the PCI bus for most pro-sumer applications? I'm talking multiple devices connected to a processor independent bus that can easily handle real-time (and accelerated) audio-video capture, encoding, surround sound steering, mixing... whatever is needed.

I'm pretty sure this can be done even with the current spec, but the bandwidth overhead of a bus 2 to 4 (or maybe 8) times faster would pretty much make it as fast as PCI? I don't claim to know, but I think there's a slight difference. -- doesn't the current PCI spec top out around 215MB/sec? A 1600Mbps (200MB/sec) firewire bus might finally make us forget the PCI bus altogether. Currently most people use the firewire bus as a fast portable storage bus. They claim the extra speed (above the current spec) is unneccessary for that purpose, and unless you want a really fast firwire RAID set-up, they're probably right. However, I thought that the original mission statement for Firewire was broader than just storage. I think some people already use firewire based sound-cards.

Apple should go for the extra bandwidth, whether storage uses it or not, it could finally answer the expansion niggles of consumer macs, and give a laptop solution beyond anything available to any other platform.

[ 12-03-2001: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>

I was thinking particularly about external devices for the consumer lines, since Apple is increasingly unlikely to include internal expansion options on those lines.

Maybe, maybe not. I'd much rather have PCI slots myself. And you can always get a powermac, I know. I'm thinking that firewire could make a suitable replacement for the PCI bus only in products where Apple seems dead set against providing any form of expansion. That's currently the scenario I guess, but with a faster bus, some really useful stuff wouldn't have to be exclusively PCI. I think the PCI card in a firewire box is exactly what could be done. Most people wouldn't have more than a few components anyway -- maybe a big HDD or two, a sound card, and some kind of hardware video effects rendering, max. The extra bandwidth could be there just to make sure it all runs smoothly.

If a company put a soundblaster Audigy in a firewire enclosure and it could run at the same speed as a PCI version, would you buy it? Given that there really isn't any other way to get this on your iMac?

I think that the main difference between firewire and USB (even for USB 2) is that firewire doesn't depend on the processor while USB does. I think that's why 400mbps firewire is actually faster in some tasks, than 480mbps USB2.