Business centered around the FireWire (or IEEE 1394) interconnect is starting to hot up, according to the 1394 Trade Association. At MacWorld last month there was evidence that the technology was moving beyond digital video – where 7m camcorders have already been shipped, with 1m more shipping per month – into storage and other products. In Japan and Asia, two or three FireWire- enabled PCs are expected by the fourth quarter, along with set-top boxes, DVD-RAM and digital TVs suing the interface.
While Apple Computer Inc – which helped develop the technology and collects royalties – has embedded FireWire into all new Macintoshes, PC manufactures have been slower to adopt it. But there have now been announcements from Sony Corp, Panasonic, NEC Corp, Compaq Computer Corp and Gateway Inc, and the Association expects some three-quarters of the 8m Firewire-enable PCs expected to ship this year to be Windows-based.
Research firm Cahners In-Stat expects peripheral unit volumes to triple in 1999 over last year’s figure marking the beginning of a significant adoption of IEEE 1394 across a variety of products. But Cahners says the forthcoming USB 2.0 poses a threat, and that the arguments over licensing, mostly resolved earlier this year had a major impact on adoption.
Apple has a high-end server, codenamed Hammerhead, under development, which may ship with dual or quad PowerPC G4 processors. These may ship with 800Mbps FireWire busses for hot- swappable storage bays, in place of Ultra160SCSI, according to the MacOS Rumors web site. Apple is said to be watching how the FireWire storage market develops before making a decision.
