What's the Difference Between Parallel and Serial? 

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

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.

You guys should do a collab with LinusTechTips

I loved the machine gun/shotgun analogy. Genius!

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

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.

Serial the parallel killer.

Did he drop a Threadripper already?

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.?

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

3:26 "Isn't THAT parallel?" 😅

The only Linus content that is worth watching anymore

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The shotgun comparison was nice.

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.

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

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

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.

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

TechQuickie, explaining the *LATEST* tech!

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.

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

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.

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

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. :)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

SO MUCH TO LEARN!!!

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

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

great visuals to help. thanks for your content.

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

This was very well exolained

I have a whole bucket load of what appears to be DB 37 Serial data storage cartridges (predecessor to USB thumb drive by the looks of it, to me at least) and I'm trying to figure out more about them. I have these because my Grandfather custom built a few barrel organs in his life time, usually barrel organs are analog instruments which use rolls of perforated paper to produce music, my Granps being the absolute 1980s-1990s tech wizard he was, completely rebuilt the guts of the organs, turning them digital. They read MIDI files off of these extremely obscure, dated 37 pin cartridges (I think serial DB 37), the cardriges themselves are totally black plastic, about 3x2x0.75 inches with right angle edges and corners, and absolutely no branding or text on the device other than the hand written labels of what songs are on each cartridge. Anyway, I inherited all this stuff and would love to figure out more about it all, I'd LOVE to be able to hook up some of these cartridges to modern hardware and see if I can write any custom music to be played on the organ. I'm an actual musician, which is why I inherited all of this, so it would be a blast to give some new life to my Grandad's old project.

I WAS EATING FROSTED FLAKES WHILE WATCHING THIS AND THAT PUN MADE ME SPIT IT OUT ON MY MONITOR XD

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

Question: Is the layout called a "bus" because it looks like a top-down view of a people sitting on a bus? I noticed this the other day and wondered if i'm late to the game or...

a video talking about ipconfig ports would be great

haha liked the Shotgun/MG comparison ;)

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!

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

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.

You are King Linus! Continue with the good work !

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

I've noticed some network or server boards still have parallel ports on them (no I'm not talking about serial COM either).

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.

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

Nothing abaout AGP (Woodo cards). Would like a video about serial PCI then paralell AGP and finally serial PCI-e today. I think that AGP was a super fast parallel port standard for the graphics card?

3:14 No matter how many people make jokes on Linus he ain't gonna stop those puns.

Good video man I like the machine gun explanation thank you

you took me back eons

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

wow with this funny guy i really remember the work

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?

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

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.

Great explanation , thanks

Good video again well done Linus

i'm in love with this channel

can you do this same video but about watercooling multiple gpus? serial vs parallel water flow?

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

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

this helped me out ..thank you

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

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

@3:31 "Hey, your room is on fire!" - "Just let me put my pc together first."

So a parallel killer is more likely to mess up than a serial killer? 😁

hey jo(h)n, perhaps a techquickie video about gamma and/or brightness? both hardware (so on your monitor and tv settings) and software (like in games and/or image/video editing software). thanks

Linus can you do a video on Microsoft BOB, clippy and the MS agents and Cortana? Thanks!