Difference between NI GPIB-USB-HS+ and NI GPIB-USB-HS

[Funan]

I would like to know the difference between GPIB USB HS+ and HS (without the +)
Seems to me that the HS has no on board GPIB analyzer but has a GPIB ASIC Chip.

Main difference would be the speed, which is strange, the HS has a faster speed than the HS+.

Anyone using or has used before both of these? Is there any difference from user POV?

[Dennis_Knutson]

The only difference is the GPIB analyser function of the + model. Where do you see that the HS is faster? The product pages do not say this.

For normal usage, you'll never notice the difference. I once had a + model for special debug purposes and I could swap it in and out freely.

[Funan]

https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/model/gpib-usb-hs.html

https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/model/gpib-usb-hs-.html

I looked at the specification from the two websites as linked. The Baud rates are faster for the HS model, and the HS model is more expensive than HS+.
I'm do not fully understand the meaning of the speeds, so I might be hugely mistaken about what I'm reading.

[Dennis_Knutson]

The specs are the same. Both list 1.8MB/s for 488.1 and up to 7.9 MB/s for HS488. Both of the speeds are part of IEEE specs so you are worrying needlessly.

Yes, the + version is cheaper and as should be obvious, the HS is not recommended for new designs. Buy the recommended + version.

[waicheung]

That is not what I'm seeing for the HS+. I've screenshot the image.
Is there something I'm not seeing/understanding?

[Dennis_Knutson · Accepted solution]

The + says 1830 kB/s which equals 1.8 MB/s. You don't understand that?

[Funan]

Arh yes, my mistake.
Was simply looking at the unit and assumsed k is smaller than the M.
Seems like HS+ is faster then.

Many thanks

[linu95k]

Why is HS+ cheaper than HS? Asking out of curiousity, HS+ offer better speeds and debug capabilities so why is it cheaper?

[crossrulz]

GPIB-USB-HS is in the "Mature" lifecycle, meaning it is scheduled to be obsolete in the near future.  NI has a history of raising prices on mature products to encourage the use of the replacement product.

My guess here is that GPIB is becoming less and less used, so NI is consolidating to just the + product.

[rolfk]

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@crossrulz wrote:

GPIB-USB-HS is in the "Mature" lifecycle, meaning it is scheduled to be obsolete in the near future.  NI has a history of raising prices on mature products to encourage the use of the replacement product.

My guess here is that GPIB is becoming less and less used, so NI is consolidating to just the + product.

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Your guess is very accurate! NI in recent years generally hikes the price of products they want to phase out. It serves two purposes:

1) It encourages people to choose a different product and eventually the low sales of that product will make it easy to announce an EOL date as there will be very few people being affected by it.

2) It earns an extra buck on those who insist to use the product, to pay for additional costs of manufacturing and maintaining an extra product.

In the case of the GPIB-USB-HS device, it is most likely even so that both variants really contain the same, very highly integrated NI specific ASIC chip. During production and final testing most likely some device internal fuse is blown to disable the analyzer functionality on the HS variants. Developing an integrated circuit is relatively expensive, but having a few 100000 transistors more on a cheap costs very little. So having one single chip that can be used on several variants of devices is much cheaper unless you talk about several million units per variant. NI was (and still is until now) THE GPIB interface manufacturer, but I'm pretty sure they never got even close to the numbers of devices per year that would be required to make different ASICs for those devices significantly more cost effective.

That was different 30 years ago where many GPIB devices were still build with discrete logic circuits, but NI was one of the first starting with high integrated self developed circuits for these boards and DAQ boards too.

That gave them several advantages over the competition:

- While initial development of a custom integrated circuit is quite expensive, once you have a working sample, things are very cheap. You can have those circuits produced for barely more than what you would pay for 2 or 3 discrete logic chips, so it gets a lot cheaper to build a hardware board.

- A single chip uses much less space so your board can get smaller too and production of the board is a lot cheaper as there is much less chance for production faults.

- Highly integrated circuits perform better, so you get also performance advantages.

In the case of NI this meant they could sell their boards for the same or higher price than the competition, while it cost them a fraction of the price that the competition had to pay to produce them. This resulted in NI taking over the entire plugin DAQ and instrument market within about 10 years.