Apple Acquires Zayante
<a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/04-04-2002/0001699538&EDATE=" target="_blank">Press Release</a>
Apple today announced that it has acquired Zayante, a leader in IEEE 1394 (FireWire) technology and services. Founded in 1996, Zayante developes the silicon and software used by leading manufacturers to create FireWire devices. "By acquiring Zayante, Apple is extending its commitment to FireWire as the premiere, high-speed digital interface solution," Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering said in a statement. Terms of the acquisition were not released; Zayante has received US$4.5 million in venture capital financing to date.
Apple today announced that it has acquired Zayante, a leader in IEEE 1394 (FireWire) technology and services. Founded in 1996, Zayante developes the silicon and software used by leading manufacturers to create FireWire devices. "By acquiring Zayante, Apple is extending its commitment to FireWire as the premiere, high-speed digital interface solution," Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering said in a statement. Terms of the acquisition were not released; Zayante has received US$4.5 million in venture capital financing to date.
Comments
J :cool:
<strong>You have a marketing department? When will I see TV ads</strong><hr></blockquote>
Soon hopefully, I'm looking for a decent production company. Someone like Voodoo Samurai
J :cool:
This is great news for Apple and 1394b as <a href="http://www.zayante.com" target="_blank">Zayante</a> makes 1394b chipsets and software.
If you rake through the web site you'll find some references to HAVi (Home Audio Video interoperability) software and hardware as well. iTivo anyone?
J :cool:
<strong>Jamie, you're on the right track. Let's just hope their firewire b spec includes 1600Mbps, otherwise it'll be a bit of a waste as you need at least 1200Mbps for uncompressed HD DV video, and the current 400Mbps is enough for the compressed kind. 800Mbps is a kind of limbo as far as usefulness is concerned.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Now, now, let's not contradict ;-) There is no such thing as uncompressed DV... you mean native DV video, or DV Compressed video. It's a pet peeve
1. Can u say "gigawire"? Good. I knew u could.
2. Zayante has been almost single-handedly shepherding 1394b thru the IEEE standards review process. Could it be that with that process down to dotting i's and crossing t's, Apple will take Zayante's 1394b silicon and start shipping it, making it the defacto standard? I think TI is the only one else sampling chips now.
3. (meta-comment) in this context, future hardware was as good a place as any for this thread.
4. The current draft spec (v 1.33) fully documents S1600 (1.6Gbs). The question isn't "will 1394b support the higher speed?" The question is, "will device manufacturers (disk drive arrays, dvd drives, video cameras, audio mixers, hdtv's...) drive the new links at the higher speed?" I suppose Apple could put a 1394b connector on a future Mac with support only for S800, especially if the bus /mb inter-connections were too slow, but that seems quite short-sighted.
5. Can you imagine a terrabyte 1394b raid disk array running at 160MBs? Oooh, la, la. Video, multitrac-audio editting at the next level.
voxclamantis, actually, 1.6Gb/s would be 200MB/s, or nearly as fast as Apple's current 64bit PCI bus. Two independent channels on a desktop mac would probably be enough for just about any external storage/audio card/video capture solution you could think of. Neat, eh? You know, at that speed, it would even compare nicely to a PCI video card! Imagine a firewire video card periph to let you run two monitors off your iMac! MUhahahaha! Firewire was supposed to scale to 3.2Gb/s (400MB/s) over optical connections. I don't think we'll see that much bandwidth from Apple (on a single plug) unless HAVi spec calls for it, but a couple of channels would make just about any expansion possible for the iMac and notebook lines. At that point you wouldn't really want to use PCI cards on your powermac either, unless they get around to offering PCI-X.
I think a modern Apple motherboard is nearing completion and it should be interesting when it finally debuts.
Ty
Sorry if I went on a bit, very exciting.
Again I go on but I'm trying to see fault in my argument, I can't.
Ty
Yeah, very fast firewire clusters that are simple to set-up and maintain might be just the ticket for small to mid-size labs, academic use, a video/3-d studio.
I guess where speculation is concerned around here, it's either grand delusion or nothing. <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
[ 04-05-2002: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>