Universal Serial Bus 3.0 is just around the corner, but it does not mean that its brother IEEE 1394 standard (also known as FireWire and iLink) has ceased its development. In fact, this month the 1394 trade association said that it had ratified the 1394-2008 specification, which significantly improves bandwidth of the interconnect.
The 1394-2008 high performance serial bus standard updates and revises all prior 1394 standards dating back to the original 1394-1995 version, and including 1394a, 1394b, 1394c, enhanced UTP, and the 1394 beta plus PHY-Link interface. It also incorporates the complete specifications for S1600 version with 1.6Gb/s bandwidth) and for S3200 version, which provides 3.2Gb/s speed.