by , 8:00 AM EDT, August 31st, 2001
Ask any knowledgeable consumer in the market for FireWire storage for advice and you'll hear, "get something with the Oxford 911 chipset, it's the fastest." Then you'll say, "What the &$@% is that?" Well, I recently spoke with James Lewis the president of Oxford Semiconductor, the company responsible for this burst of speed, to find out.
Oxford got its start in England, making application specific integrated circuits (ASIC's) for customers to their specifications. As the company began to build and market its own standard chipsets, USB was all the rage.
"USB was coming along at that point, but we could see some issues with USB in that there were lots of manufacturers moving into that field, and support issues were not terribly good. As we guessed, the chip prices really got fought down before the market even developed fully. We were glad that we overlooked that one. At that point the specs for FireWire, for 1394 were just being defined, so we decided we'd be first to market with that rather than last to market with USB." The company didn't ignore USB entirely though. "The onset of legacy free PC's has meant there's been a big aftermarket requirement for serial and parallel ports to connect. [...] We've had our chips used in things like serial to USB adapters for the iMac."
Right now though the focus is firmly on FireWire. The 911 is the company's 2nd generation IDE to FireWire bridge chipset, the first being the 900 which entered the market at the tail end of 1999. "[It] was quite a major step in terms of integration because it has a RISC processor, an ARM processor." ARM being the same Apple held British company responsible for the StrongARM processor that was used in the late Newton PDA.
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The Benchmarks Mac performance site, Accelerate Your Mac has been following the emergence of the 911 with benchmarks and real word tests so you can see the differences between the theoretical maximums mentioned here, and the level of performance you can expect. There are also two build guides for hard drive case kits from Other World Computing and TransIntl: Transintl.com's Portable FireWire Case Kit Are devices with this chipset commanding a price premium? It doesn't seem to be the case, although a cursory examination of the two manufacturers mentioned above plus LaCie revealed little. Comparison between manufacturers' products wouldn't necessarily isolate the 911's cost since there are other variables like case design, economies of scale, etc. Other World for example, doesn't seem to be selling identical drives using old and new chipsets. LaCie doesn't mention the 911 at all, although listing a sustained transfer rate of 35MB/sec is a telltale sign that something's improved. If a manufacturer doesn't specifically mention the 911 in its marketing, it might be worthwhile to ask. As of this writing, you can expect to pay around $240 US for a 40 GB external drive with a 911 chipset. |
This is done with two processors, one being an ARM 7 which is a "soft" processor. Think of it as a very simple example of what Connectix's Virtual PC is; software code that acts like a piece of hardware. The ARM 7 resides in less than 512 K of flash memory. It's customizable and hence upgradeable via the FireWire port, and it handles the management of things like boot up. There's also a coprocessor in hardware to do time critical command interpretation and translation. As a result, the ARM only needs to use about 30% of its processing power at any given time.
Oxford is demoing a version of firmware that lets the ARM do more: administering a filesystem. Why should they want to do this? Connect a FireWire hard drive to a Mac, and the Mac administers the files, right? Sure, but what if you want to access data on the drive when it's not connected to a computer?
Add an MP3 codec and some audio chips and you've got a hard drive that doubles as a standalone MP3 player. "This merges into Apple's iTunes very well," said Mr. Lewis. "Obviously iTunes allows you to manage MP3 files on your Mac. What we can do now is just write those MP3 files from [the] directory structure on your Mac, dump them into the MP3 player in seconds." Remember now, this is at 42 MB/sec FireWire speeds, not USB. Could this setup conceivably enable a hybrid MP3 player and FireWire hard drive? Yes. That means no more synchronizing with iTunes at all. Keep the iTunes library on this hybrid device. Use iTunes when it's connected to a Mac or unplug it, and use it as a standalone player.
By sticking to the open specification of FireWire, they haven't needed any assistance from Apple. "We've obviously had discussions with Apple, just to make them aware of what we're doing and allow them to test the chips. They've kept a healthy interest in everything we've done so far, and stuff that we're doing for the future."
And what does the future hold for Oxford Semiconductor? They're working on some Bluetooth projects, and they're looking into USB 2.0. But with most of their engineering effort behind FireWire, new things are in the works. "If you look at where the 1394 spec is going, that's where we're going as well." With the 911, the bridge is no longer the bottleneck. Using 400 Mbps FireWire, and getting maximum throughputs of 42 MB/sec, "that's more or less the maximum that disk drives will give you at the moment." But the 911's can, because of their IDE controller, host both a master and a slave device, or two hard drives. That's one clue about future devices. Another has got to be the impending arrival of 1394b which is FireWire at 800 Mbps.