What's the Difference Between Parallel and Serial?

[@Hezren]

3:32 I too install my GPU while my house is on fire.

[@dootthedooter]

Son:DaD THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! Dad: Hold on i'm building a PC

[@AlfaPro1337]

Dad takes his own sweet time, checking all of the components, debugging, while everyone around him panics, running around like mad.

[@SumeetSinghM]

Suddenly, dad sees an error. He grows suspicious.

[@iz723]

"this is fine"

[@warriorsmustang1784]

He gets engulfed in flames, and hes like, "hold on, i'm playing the witcher 3"

[@Joostinonline]

That brings back nightmares about removing IDE cables. You couldn't pull the cable itself because it could damage it, which meant pinching both sides. When you finally got it loose, your hand would slingshot out and you could cut yourself on the sharp edges that used to be in cases.

[@gwgux]

Not to mention all the dust that gets trapped with those wide ribbon cables. I've seen some real nasty stuff build up in there.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

Am I the only one who has never had this issue?

[@Joostinonline]

@@qwertykeyboard5901 Either you're too young to have dealt with it, or you had some of the nicer IDE cables that had attachments for pulling on to avoid injury.

[@gabrocki]

I loved the machine gun/shotgun analogy. Genius!

[@KixSlim]

Should've been machine gun vs line firing

[@GewelReal]

he forgot about 19th century multi-gun/barrell... weapons (pre-mg's)

[@HelloKittyFanMan....]

I like that, Gabrocki, but I like the video of machine gun even better! LOL, a gun spitting out numbers! He did a great job editing that! But oh yeah, Red Power Ranger, you have a good point there!

[@krazyfrog]

That was for the Americans in the crowd who until then had no idea what was going on.

[@wweislife5685]

gabrocki literary was about to comment that like a second before he said

[@MrTomWaffles]

You guys should do a collab with LinusTechTips

[@NateMint]

Hah

[@mrc14_2]

Mr Tom Waffles [COD Mapper] Wat they already are

[@kristik432]

or Taras kul

[@ricardow9281]

That's the joke..

[@togwam]

Mr Tom Waffles [COD Mapper] that would be lit bruh, why hasn't that happened yet?

[@ikichullo]

My sister heard you talking and said "Is that bob the tomato from veggie tales?"

[@rameynoodles152]

He does kinda sound like bob from veggie tales actually...

[@jimstanley_49]

LOL! It's close, but I think Linus' voice is a bit too high and squeaky to be Bob.

[@Mrspiderman20014]

.....i never fucking thought about that....OH DAMN HE DOES?!!!!

[@SomeNot]

Sean Ramey #

[@dehCremus]

Hey, this comment was in the latest "mean comments" video on LTT

[@randomgeocacher]

3:33 explaining clock recovery encoding protocols like 8/10 might be relevant for future videos, as it helps viewers understand how high speed communication work without a dedicated shared system clock between components. Also useful for understanding why 1Gbit=100Mbyte. Other relevant topic: Could be interesting to also cover the actual pins on a cable, e.g. USB, Ethernet, SATA, and wtf they actually do, and cover differential signaling and how it reduces interference problems.

[@manmeetsingh706]

Serial the parallel killer.

[@lapinus]

LOL

[@togwam]

Manmeet Singh how can one kill in parallel anyway

[@qetzyl9911]

@@togwam Maybe dual wielding?

[@togwam]

@@qetzyl9911 not very parallel

[@sokacsavok]

Sorry, but saying "USB got one data line in each direction" is false. USB 2.0 and lower only has D+ and D- as signal lines, but this is a differential pair. Meaning, that it basically carries the same information at the same direction at each time (half-duplex), but the signals are the inverse of each other to block outside interference. From USB 3.0, the cable got two more pairs for each direction (SuperSpeed tx/rx), but the old pair is still there to make your statement false and to confuse everyone.

[@VWT1BVDS]

Did he drop a Threadripper already?

[@mahmoodmohanad4726]

jayz two cents dropped one instead

[@redjstudios7036]

Mahmood Mohanad Ltt replied “dropping stuff is our thing@

[@abdulmuhaimin5274]

2 days ago

[@FtwXXgigady]

the difference is that cereal is a food you silly goose. I didn't watch the video but if lyonous makes a joke about cereal I'm suing.

[@AbuMshMsh]

He did at the end🙂

[@FtwXXgigady]

I hope leonardus has good lawyers

[@HelloKittyFanMan....]

Why not watch the video, Eprepp?

[@WahotsW]

concise, well thought out, and well written. Keep up the good work, whoever wrote this episode and did the animations!

[@obsoletepowercorrupts]

This video had a few good points but was marred, and it could confuse people. Had you simply mentioned _"parallel to serial compression"_ (like USB) requiring (a chipset) doing processing of it, it would have cleared up the "magic" mystery of why and how people managed to get from the data rates of parallel to those of serial. The pay-off and trade-off would start to dawn on them because it isn't "magic". You could then have simply "name dropped" Fourier mathematics, and then people could at least look it up in a book or online. There was a reason parallel existed (high data rates and also acting as the first GPIO), and yet form your video people could walk away thinking serial should have only ever been the way forward and that somehow there was no hurdle to get the benefits of parallel into serial. You don't even have to "explain" the complicated stuff. Just "mention" the word and then people can have a look. The notion of pins being prone to damage is *not* an argument against parallel when comparing to serial. Not only can you wire to (and thereby adapt) the shape of something else like an rj11 or rj45 connector for a parallel (so the size and pins can be smaller), but also a serial (e.g. a great big RS232 null modem cable) can be about the same size as a parallel printer cable.

[@robertwitt1276]

seriously an awesome video man! studying right now for my embedded miscroprocessor systems design class right now and you are motivating me to study!

[@Tobias11ize]

3:32 tfw you forge a pc in a dying star

[@HitMarkersAreFun]

let's all eat cereal at the same time so we can be parallel. and no, it doesn't all have to be the same cereal :)

[@cameroncuff5962]

Brolivia Wilde I got the cinnamon toast crunch

[@hannahkan0622]

Ba tum tss

[@HelloKittyFanMan....]

Haha, Brolivia!

[@HitMarkersAreFun]

@Williammc10 CoaCoa Crispies :)

[@RomelVera]

Future Video suggestion: Subwoofer types... the subwoofer must be on the floor or on the table/desk? Why not under the desk or why not on the table? Does the subwoofer speaker design matters? and why? Can the vibration damage the computer components, ex: hdd, ram, etc.?

[@Henrix1998]

The only Linus content that is worth watching anymore

[@webbophone3377]

Thanks very much! Been trying to wrap my head around this for a while and I am glad I found your video!

[@Velo1010]

Dude! You have one hell of a KZbin channel. That energy is exciting. I appreciate what you offer in learning- fun graphics and easy to understand. Keep up the great work.

[@eddypalogrande]

3:26 "Isn't THAT parallel?" 😅

[@aurorayancey9571]

I needed ALL OF THIS ENTERTAINMENT. Reminds me of how engaged I was watching Bill Nye the Science guy as a kid. He made me fall in love with science and you make learning boring info easy.

[@Roxor128]

Fun fact: Australia's first computer, CSIRAC, used a serial bus for moving data around internally. This was back in the late 1940s, when 2000 valves and 1000 IPS was impressive.

[@RAVANAZAR]

Parallel will catch up and out perform serial eventually. Sure crosstalk is a problem with ribbon cable but twisted pair advances along with proper shielding can offer more bandwidth along with TDMA style data synchronization and other transport level data timing matching technology.

[@mariushmedias]

A lot of serial communication stuff is clock and data ( i2c , i2s, spi) and usb is NOT receive and transmit, but Data+ and DATA- , one wire is inverse of the other... same for other things.

[@maurices.3194]

You took a funny example with the soldiers. Made my evening today.

[@HimselfXD]

"I wouldn't bother trying to eat your bowl of frosted flakes one at a time." ..... Challenge accepted!

[@shmehfleh3115]

Fun fact: You can get a PCIe x4, 8, 16, etc card working in an x1 slot by either sawing the extra pins off the card or cutting open the PCIe connector on the motherboard. I had to do this once, to get a video card to work in a PC that only had 1 x1 slot remaining. (The x16 slot was occupied by an HBA.) It worked reasonably well, although the drop in bandwidth/performance was apparent even at the Windows desktop.

[@notjacob2589]

TechQuickie, explaining the *LATEST* tech!

[@picolete]

In my 12 years in IT at a company i have seen more sata and USB ports broken than IDE, Paralels and COM ports

[@surject]

Dito, just 25y :)

[@unanonymous4655]

well 12 years ago was in 2005 and USB was basically already the standard and SATA was gaining popularity over IDE. That and with IDE there was always a chance that the pins would bend if you didn't pull the cable out exactly at 90° and it was a huge chore to bend them back. Which, although it usually doesn't require IT assistance, is still a pain in the ass.

[@deltoid77-nick]

Same

[@picolete]

But remember that most companies have old hardware and it takes time to upgrade everything, we still have some Compaqs with P2, P3 and P4 runing(those fuckers wont break) they are used in deposits and cargo bays to show some stuff, so is not necesary to upgrade them for now

[@jort93z]

you dont usually remove parallel ports as often. thats why most of the external parallel ports have screws and screwholes and the internal ones are, well internal and not plug and play. if you were to plug an IEEE 1284 connector into a port multiple times a day it would break in no time. but usually you don't actually remove or insert a plug a whole lot.

[@EkwereLaw1]

Linus thanks for helping me learn lots of stuff daily. Hailing from Nigeria as me and my buddy watch you all the time

[@dumpling3309]

Thank you so much Linus in helping me digest Serial I/O.

[@manuelruhguevara1601]

USB does not have one data line in each direction. USB uses differential data signaling, this means that one data line can be mapped to 2 physical wires, one being D- and the other D+, so when one wire goes high voltage, the other goes low voltage. Differential signaling allow serial communications to be faster because they are able to send data with lower voltage swings without being affected by ambient noise. As for the clock it goes embedded in each data signal and is reconstructed by the receiver.

[@PixelBrushArt]

I'd love to see Linus try to build a DOS Gaming PC.

[@swethadeepak3029]

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PARALLEL AND SERIAL:----- SIR, YOU EXPLAINED WELL AND I FOUND THE VIDEO USEFUL TO NOTE. THANKS VATSA INDIA

[@bruh-ky1cl]

thanks Linus, this gonna help me for my Computer Science Exam!

[@pollsmor]

The shotgun comparison was nice.

[@TheKidnappedOne]

I've used a similar example of the rate of fire of a shot gun and its dispersion of the shells loads to a automatic fire weapon, to explain some of the differences to people who don't really get the differences so easily.

[@herrwetzel9790]

Shoving that GPU in sideways at 3:30 gave me goose bumps

[@tibbesnel7694]

I was searching for this and couldn't find it, and i just found this video from very long ago from Linus himself!

[@thenoobcannon9830]

Automatic machine gun? as opposed to one of those bolt action machine guns?

[@jrsmithunited]

perhaps in contrast to the gattling gun or metal storm.

[@NateMint]

There's also the pump-action machine guns, he's just trying to be specific

[@braedenstumm4375]

Nate I can't tell if you're joking or not

[@ZiMZiLLA]

Gattling guns are non-automatic machine guns

[@Toad_Hugger]

thenoobcannon Well, I suppose a machine-gun is just a gun that operates by using mechanisms for reloading, ejecting, and whatnot instead of needing the input of a human every step of the way. And automatic is a general term I suppose, so he's not that incorrect. So long as it functions by itself without someone having to baby it every step of the way I suppose it's automatic, and if it does that with mechanisms, it's a machine. I dunno, though.

[@korndogz69]

This brings back memories from when PC parts were more expensive, and repairing parts was more common rather than disposing of them, and delicately straightening those bent pins on drives, cables, and motherboards. Speaking of pins, I still have a large jar full of gold CPU pins that I used to extract from junked PCs. I should smelt that down into a gold bar sometime.

[@Hybris51129]

What was burning the background of the video card install? Did someone try to overclock the Threadripper?

[@dsfromsomewhere]

Maybe...or just Satan changing or installing his computer's GPU

[@bushmasters1984]

great visuals to help. thanks for your content.

[@Many_Mirrors]

You can be a serial but not a parallel killer..

[@00Klingon]

You didn't mention the speed of chipset meaning there was a limit to baud that each chip could interpret the data in serial. It was cheaper to put them in parallel and feed the more expensive CPU that way than to buy a chip fast enough to talk in serial at the same speed. It wasn't until these chipsets became more powerful and less expensive that serial was able to take over. It also helped that we were reaching limits with parallel speeds anyway due to the aforementioned crosstalk, etc.

[@floydian25]

If only you had uploaded this yesterday. I had an exam on this today :(

[@adriancarp3476]

American way, use guns to explain stuff I KNOW, THEY ARE CANADIANS

[@Chibibowa]

They are all british, kinda... xD

[@ameerlouly6628]

I thiuguht that's the Russians way XD

[@DanneManne88]

You are King Linus! Continue with the good work !

[@dalalalghomlas1600]

i'm in love with this channel

[@csl9495]

the Traffic and Machine gun/ shot gun analogy, blew my mind lol.

[@Baldrick_dogsbody]

This was very well exolained

[@lucamelody-bamford9926]

Good video again well done Linus

[@RenaKry]

That gun analogy is perhaps the most American way I have ever heard anyone explain serial and parallel.

[@vandyklessing8266]

Linus, could you explain the difference between Fiber connections (SX, LC, ST ; Maybe even direct dopper and SFP/+) and Multi Mode and Single Mode ?

[@CalebAstle]

SO MUCH TO LEARN!!!

[@XOIIOXOIIO]

It should be noted that there are dual port SAS drives, which have multiple channels, whereas SATA only has one, so that's another part that kind of blurs the lines a little bit, like PCI

[@thetradefloor]

Tunnelbear is dooope! I use it on my Mac and iOS, works briliiantly most of the time. Thx Linus for suggesting such a well designed seamless app!

[@illuminatioracle]

3:31 this pci-e video card was FORGED IN THE FLAMES OF HELL

[@seven0929]

Those bear icons are awesome, give my compliments to the guy who has designed them :)

[@irishmun1130]

Was genuinely thinking this video would be about parallel and serial wiring in circuitry.

I loved that machine gun illustration.

[@ALFABETAS999]

2:31 It is all about sending a message :D

[@locochonloco]

Great explanation , thanks

[@Keyakina]

Wow.. someone should bring out a serial and call it parallel!! *MIND=BLOWN*

[@SoumyadeepBanerjee007]

If I could see Linus in person. huge fan btw from West Bengal

[@SoumyadeepBanerjee007]

FIRST I WILL GIVE A BIG HUG,THEN I WANT AN AUTOGRAPH ON MY 1ST PC

[@wolfgangervin2582]

What's crazy is that SCSI is STILL around. Granted, the switch from parallel to serial in 2004 probably played a big role in that.

[@tankweeb9425]

I would say a better comparison would be comparing a minigun to a volley-gun.

[@aleksandarturkulovic7732]

Hey Linus, since you are talking about all those different ports, I was thinking about you making a video about firewire. It was said that it was faster than a usb 2.0 back in the day.

[@samuelgoss1529]

a video talking about ipconfig ports would be great

[@028abc]

Please do a video on PCI vs other serial protocols like I2C

[@greaterthanbut]

you took me back eons

[@suitub5710]

Make great great great sense to me! Thank you so much, dude

[@mdavis5826]

love that you're giving some props to the legacy stuff~ next you'll be assembling an IBM486 ;) (hey, a girl can dream)

[@mikkoheiska2109]

Great video! :) I would find it very interesting if you could do a Techquickie on computer component power consumption, particularly that of CPUs and GPUs and what constitutes it. What does the electricity actually do inside the components - what is it needed for? Also, the GTX 580 from around 7 years back and a modern GTX 1080 Ti both have similar power consumption yet the difference in performance is, of course, absolutely massive. Similar trends can be seen on CPUs as well. What has allowed these huge advancements in power efficiency and can we expect this trend to continue still as time passes on - is there still much that can be done to improve power efficiency? Where are the physical limits as to how low power consumption could be dropped in the future for a given level of performance (a certain amount of FLOPS)? Also, how are CPUs used on mobile devices and laptops able to achieve such low power consumption ratings despite still being fairly powerful? It would be very interesting to learn about these things! All the best to the whole team and thank you for making these videos. :)

[@The__Mask]

i definitely don't miss the days when you had to pin the master/slave etc and when you had to type in all the volume information for a hard drive into the bios, Plug and Play all the way.

[@yaroslavk295]

The two USB (2.x) data pins are NOT one for each direction. Both comprise a differential pair of a single data link.

[@oyekunlequadri6115]

Cool description. Thumbs up!

[@Remington510]

Neat video, explains a lot, is very visual and easy to understand :) Salary bonus for the guy who came up with machine gun vs. shotgun example :D

[@jeremyandrews3292]

There are definitely some limitations to standards like USB. Some industrial applications actually do work find parallel connection more reliable if they need a specific thing to be refreshed as quickly as possible. A serial bus really doesn't lend itself quite as well to real-time applications, and a couple of unusual examples would be USB keyboards not having NKRO, and the fact that an SNES controller can be more responsive on the original hardware than a USB knockoff can be on a PC. USB in particular has the limitation of relying on the OS polling a certain number of times per second, where some parallel standards can use straight up hardware interrupts, so the device can tell the computer about state changes as soon as they happen rather than waiting for the next poll. I'm kind of glad the PS/2 ports are still around.

[@Persun_McPersonson]

USB keyboards not supporting NKRO is a common myth. USB mice are also not any less fast or reliable than PS/2 mice. USB has matured and evolved enough at this point that the advantages PS/2 once had are pretty much moot.

[@shreesapkota]

Even a noob can understand this. You are a hero :)

[@simsneon2]

Good video man I like the machine gun explanation thank you

[@Jaymac720]

I’m assuming this means that each wire in a USB cable (for example) handles one set of information bit by bit while other wires can handle other sets of info simultaneously. Parallel connections have every wire containing one bit of each byte so they’re effectively working together all the time whereas the wires in a serial connection operate independently

[@muthi_hib]

What is lithiom polymer battery, what is lithium ion battery, and so on, I am little confused about all these, please explain to me as fast as possible

[@mattthegamerhongkong6948]

Lithium Polymer battery=lithium ion battery in a polymer shell

[@2f4uReActiON]

I thought crosstalk was between a receiver and transmitter (side by side) wires. Cause the transmitter has much more signal in the beginning of the wire and after some distance (that the receiver's signal is not faided that much) had electrical interference with eachother.

[@simontay4851]

My first PC was a 386 in 1980s and I've *never* seen an IDE or parallel port with broken pins from then upto now. I now repair and build PCs as a hobby/business and ive seen lots of damaged SATA and USB ports on modern motherboards and laptops. I wish SATA used pin headers and ribbon cables like IDE except just 7 pins instead of 40. You have to be really careful not to put side ways force on m'brd SATA connectors as the plugs are taller and the connectors can easily be damaged.

[@neerajsoni5134]

Really great video

[@nhsplayer07]

this helped me out ..thank you

[@qingdasoon9226]

Hi Linus, can you do a video on the effects of vibrations on hdd including how concern should consumers be when buying a speaker system that includes sub-woofer for a desktop PC set-up? Thanks.

[@surprisealabi9596]

wow with this funny guy i really remember the work

[@Madmax23419]

USB has 2 data lines, but has one data stream. :D Data lines can work in differential or in single end, the data lines get switch on different USB speeds. USB3.x has 4 data lines, two pairs.

[@out4space]

haha liked the Shotgun/MG comparison ;)

[@SamVidovich]

Why couldn't the parallel standard be improved to allow for the pins to transfer data independently like in PCIe?

[@scratchbin]

great explanation. thanks.

[@Georges3DPrinters]

Another suggestion, how to bridge your wi-fi and either cable to increase speed or how to use both bands of your dual channel wi-fi to your advantage to increase speeds writing to a LAN based Nas in your home

[@Georges3DPrinters]

Like upload via one, and download via another

[@FirstLast-pf2ls]

suggestion: What is an rss feeder/reader and is it still relevant in 2017? Who uses rss reader and why would we wanna use or try it?

[@RedVRCC]

That ending, I'm literally eating frosted flakes rn...

[@2f4uReActiON]

I thought crosstalk was between a receiver and transmitter (side by side) wire. Cause the transmitter has much more signal in the beginning of the wire and after some distance (that the receiver's signal is not faided that much) had electrical interference

[@SverigeKodar]

And he didn't even talk about the USB 3.2 standard that add support for parallel datastreams, effectively transforming USB to UPB :o

[@leojohndelacruz412]

Hello sir. Maybe you can help. Our old printer is 25pins male, pins number 9,10, 18 and 19. and the new printer is 36pins. Should I still use the 9,10, 18 and 19 pins in the new 36 pins interface? Will it function?

[@VivekRoy2991]

PCIe 16 lanes do not have crosstalk you mean? Crosstalk is not really a big factor while choosing serial over parallel. CSI and DSI uses multiple lanes of DPHY link. [Ex. Check Raspberry Pi where the ribbon cable that connects to a the piCam or display has multiple lanes of DPHY].