I’ve posted several thoughts in the past about Firewire, about its place in the world and its future. We’ve seen some news reported in recent days that a new USB spec is in development. USB 3.0 will be “gunning for Firewire” according to an article on EETimes. It does look to be a fast and impressive spec with data rates 10 times that of current USB. The article also states that the spec “will support multiple flows per device and is capable of maintaining separate priority levels for each flow. The capability could be used to end interrupts that cause jitter in video transmissions.” I’m no engineer but this seems like it could finally iron out one of USB 2.0’s short-comings in that it couldn’t always sustain the constant data rate that a video transfer requires. When you are ingesting that DVCPRO HD footage over Firewire and loading onto a Firewire drive then a sustained data rate seems like an important thing. Also check out the Intel press release.