ah usb one of the wonderful conveniences of
modern life you just plug it into
any one of the similar looking ports and things just work
well most of the time anyway but whatever happened to those
old-school massive things we used to use to connect printers and
hard drives well older standards like ieee 1284 and ide
cables had so many pins and took up so
much physical space because they communicated in parallel meaning that
they could send and or receive multiple bits of information
simultaneously by contrast new school interfaces like
usb sas SATA and individual pci express
lanes are serial which fun fact is actually what the s in each
acronym stands for these ones can only send or receive one
bit at a time but wait a minute
why on earth would that be better i mean when they close all but one lane on the
freeway that's a bad thing well
popular parallel standards had a number of limitations that slowed down their
real-world speed these ports depended on all of the data
lines sending the correct data simultaneously
so trying to push more and more data
through a parallel port per second means that it's harder and harder for those
lines to stay synchronized meaning that as you increased the data rate the port
actually had to slow things down and wait for all of the signals to match up
another phenomenon called crosstalk also
complicated matters crosstalk is basically electrical interference
between data lines that are close together and it becomes more pronounced
when you add more lines than again when
you try to make them faster because a serial connection like usb
only has one data line in each direction
crosstalk isn't nearly as much of an issue
this means that although serial connections can only fire off one bit at
a time the rate of fire can be made much
higher especially as electronics manufacturing in general has improved so
think of an automatic machine gun shooting tons of bullets per second one
at a time versus a break barrel shotgun
that can fire lots of pellets at once but has a much longer reload delay
parallel connections also had the disadvantage of using lots of pins to
support transmitting multiple bits at once and that meant that the connectors
themselves were more prone to damage
think about how easy it was to bend printer pins or an ide header on an old
motherboard modern serial links typically don't use
protruding pins making standards like usb and SATA suitable for
many more insertions as they say
but Linus hold on a minute what about my fancy new graphics card that uses 16 pci
express lanes at once isn't that parallel
well not really each pci express lane has its
own clock signal so they're not synchronized with each other the data is
simply transmitted down each lane in a
more independent fashion leaving the card itself to sort out the information
which doesn't take very long meaning that pci express speeds scale very well
as you add more lanes which you can see in high-speed pci express devices like
solid-state drives and video cards pretty incredible right
well that may be but as far as one bit
at a time cereal technology has come i wouldn't bother trying to eat your bowl
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subscribe and check out our other channels and i guess that's pretty much it i will see you again at the next fast
as possible as soon as possible
it's going to be as great as possible