6.5.6 Compare serial transmission with parallel transmission.
(No teaching notes for this one.)
JSR Notes:
The best thing to do here in preparation for this assessment statement, is draw your own table listing advantages and disadvantages of each.
The whole idea of serial vs. parallel is easy enough; just think of what the words mean. But also do try to think of a prime example of both. A USB (universal serial bus) cable transports one bit at a time, but plenty of them per second. Coming up with a good parallel example that you’ve actually seen in real life might be harder. Old-fashioned printers used to be connected by parallel cables. And the other place of note is actually inside of the computer, the data ribbons that connect your hard drives and other devices to the motherboard transmit in parallel. But, generally parallel transmission, when it works, should be able to transmit multiples of the one. Though do remember, from the textbook, that not all wires are for data.
And remember that, for reasons not gone into, parallel transmission doesn’t work well over long distances. That’s the reason why all Internet connections are serial. But with transmission rates that serial technology can now achieve, parallel technology is not so necessary. Firewire 800 cables for example transmit data at 800 MBits/second.