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http://www.macnn.com/articles/01/12/04/apple's.gigawire/

Apple's Gigawire mystery draws speculation

updated 01:15 pm EST, Tue December 4, 2001

 
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OSOpinion author Kelly McNeill has produced an editorial speculating on Apple's purported "Gigawire" project, for which the company has filed a trademark application. Apple's application says the device is in some regard related to "computers, telecommunications equipment and devices, or computer peripheral devices." McNeill opines that the device could be anything from an enhanced clustering scheme, to a digital audio/video transmission tool.


by MacNN Staff

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  1. chabib

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    12/04, 12:38pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    wireless firewire

    it's likely the wireless firewire protocol that's forthcoming.

  1. Joined:

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    12/04, 12:46pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    umm no

    nope,

    The only wireless firewire that 'may' be coming is going to be wireless 'firewire' at 54Mbs.

    There was just and article on this a day or so ago...
    The Firewire peeps and joining with the wireless peeps to make this happen.

    Gigawire will likely be a HIGH speed connection to join multiple computers for clustering purposes.

    or

    The name apple gives Firewire2, which will be capable of transferring at speeds of 800Mbps, 1.6Gbps, and 3.2Gbps over optical cable.

    Later

  1. ebeitzuri

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Mar 2000

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    12/04, 01:19pm | report spam | Reply |

    Duh

    If it was wireless firewire, why the h*** would they call it giga[b]wire[/b]!?

    It's so painfully obvious that this is Firewire2. Firewire 2 transmits data at 1.6 Gigabits per second over a wire. Gigabit speed over a wire = Gigawire.

    What's so difficult to figure out here?

  1. beno

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

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    12/04, 01:41pm | report spam | Reply |

    it's not obvious

    It's so painfully obvious that this is Firewire2

    that would be dumb. companies don't change the name of the product/feature every time it's capacity increases. can you imagine the confusion in consumerland?

    besides, firewire 2 is 800 mbits/s.

  1. guru

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    12/04, 03:16pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    re: it's not so obvious

    that would be dumb. companies don't change the name of the product/feature every time it's capacity increases. can you imagine the confusion in consumerland?

    Agreed. Why change the name of your brand when you've got wide user recognition across the board. Apple would definitely be risking much by changing this late in the game and would have to invest much in re-educating the masses. I would guess Gigawire may be something totally different or unexpected.

  1. Makosuke

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2001

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    12/04, 03:19pm | report spam | Reply |

    Nah...

    I'm with the obvious guy; sounds an awful lot like a faster incarnation of Firewire to me. Maybe not, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they changed/added to the name to differentiate it from USB2, the old FireWire, or just make it sound "cooler". GigaWire does have more of a ring than FireWire2.

    Besides, consumers are already dealing with 3 different names for FireWire, depending on who you're aksing: FireWire (Apple), iLink (sony), and of course 1394 (most other companies).

  1. Joined:

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    12/04, 03:28pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Maybe Apple is skipping

    over Firewire 2 (800 Mbps) and jumping to 1.2 Mbps instead of the 1.6 Mbps. That would make USB 2.0 look as fast as USB 1.0 is to Firewire 1. I'm not talking about actual transfer rate here. I'm saying that people will see 1.2 Mbps and say, "hey, Giagwire is 3 times faster than USB." What the general public doesn't know is that current Firewire is about 40 times faster than USB 1.0. Not to mention the other benefits of firewire dealing with powered devices and cable lengths, etc.

    Even if I'm wrong (which is very likely) It would be silly if Apple called a new wireless standard Gigawire which would imply the use of a cable.

  1. \0

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    12/04, 04:30pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Hmm,

    Maybe a new networking interface?

  1. synergy

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2001

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    12/04, 04:51pm | report spam | Reply |

    Gigawire

    Its not just a capacity increase, Apple is probably adding a bunch more capabilities into it. New name to connotate new stuff. Yes its backwards compatible with firewire, but it does much more as well.

  1. maniacal

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: May 2000

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    12/04, 08:27pm | report spam | Reply |

    GIGA.....

    Hmm wouldn't change the name of the standard. How about ethernet to Gigabit, or USB to USB 2.0... Those are changes to the name. Now Yes I do believe that they were working on a new version of firewire that was supposed to be 800MB/S but that figure is not a GIG... So I suppose that maybe they went one step further and exceeded the 1 gig mark hence Gigawire. Makes sense since the firewire 2 was mentioned over 2 years ago. Since it was never implemented they could have just superceded it all together.

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