The Inquirer reports that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has formally approved a 3.2Gbps supporting Firewire specification which goes by the catchy name of IEEE 1394-2008.

As well as that amazingly fast rate, IEEE 1394-2008 also supports full backwards compatibility with both S400 and S800 ports and is perfectly capable of connecting as many as 63 hot swappable peripherals in a tree format.

Which will pretty much make this the fastest game in town, at least until 2010 when Universal Serial Bus 3.0 is due to make an appearance. A very fast appearance at that, which will make IEEE 1394-2008 look positively pedestrian.

How fast?

How does 4.8Gbps sound to you?

Of course, whether the increase in nominal speed of USB 3.0 will actually mean it moves more data more efficiently than IEEE 1394-2008 is debatable. Even though Firewire-400 should be slower, on paper, than USB 2.0 out in the real world of the video professional there are few who would disagree that it actually manages a higher data throughput.