Why USB is faster than parallel port communication?

[magnetra]

USB

USB despite being a serial communication medium is faster than parallel port communication. Sounds odd. Any explanation??
Regards
Saurav

 

[IanP]

Re: USB

Speed
Q: How can Parallel Port ISA card support quoted rates of data transfer in excess of 1MB/sec ? As far a I know every in/out command for an ISA bus address takes at least 1 microsecond to perform REGARDLESS of processor speed ?

A: A simple parallel-port read or write does take one ISA-bus cycle, and on most systems, the bus speed is around 1.3 Mhz, so one cycle is a little under 1 microsecond. A complete data transfer on the original parallel port usually takes at least 4 cycles, however: check the Busy status, write the data, bring Strobe low, then high. On ports that support EPP and ECP modes, in these modes the port hardware does the handshake, and a complete transfer can take place in 1 bus cycle.

There are at least two ways of getting faster data transfers: Some ports support a "fast mode" that uses the ISA bus's NOWS (no wait state) signal to cause the CPU to skip 3 wait states. This mode is twice as fast, or around 2.7 Mhz. ECPs also include hardware support for data decompressing (& sometimes compressing, though that's often left for software), so the effective rate of data transmission can be much faster than the number of bytes written or read per second. Also, ECPs may be able to transfer data between the host's and peripheral's ECP buffers at rates greater than 1 Mhz, though the buffers are typically just 8 bytes.

I think the above explains why it is much slower than USB. I can just add that it is just an old standard..
Regards,
IanP