What's the Difference Between Parallel and Serial?

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 OEE 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 closed 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 increase the data rate the port actually had to slow things down and wait for all of the signals to match up another phenomenon called cross talk also complicated matters cross talk 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 cross talk 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 brake 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 serial technology has come I wouldn't bother trying to eat your bowl of frosted flakes one at a time do you really want your isp keeping an eye on what it is that you're doing online use tunnel their tunnel their VPN is be simple to use VPN that lets you tunnel through one of 20 different country's allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in that country they have easy-to-use apps for iOS Android PC and Mac they've also got a Chrome extension that one was upside down there you go I fixed it and it is so easy to use that your mom can do it you just press one button and boom your connection gets encrypted and there's no messing around they've got a top rated privacy policy and they don't log user activity and you can try out for free with five hundred Meg's of data and no credit card required at the link below pedobear comm / - four thanks for watching guys like dislike leave a comment with future video suggestions don't forget to 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

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 521,816

Rating: 4.9489312 out of 5

Keywords: parallel, serial, ide, pata, sata, ata, pci, pcie, express, computer, ieee, 1284, lpt1, printer, port, pins, crosstalk, clock, synchronization, data, transmission

Id: myU2x27FIIc

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/marshmap]

Omg queers was this video when I was curious on the topic like 2 days ago. Literally searched ‘serial vs parallel ports linus’.

[u/triadwarfare]

Parallel cables should be compared to soldiers firing a musket in a line.