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Apple and Intel Collaborate on Next Generation 'Light Peak' Connectors?

cameronjpu said:
So what happens when I plug my external hard drive into my monitor connector?
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You're missing the point: There is no designated monitor connector, just a bunch of LP connectors, where you can plug in whatever you want, as long as it comes with LP - be it monitors, drives, network routers, whatever. The computer now recognizes what you have plugged in and internally routes the data from the port to he right places and back automatically.

Jojo
 
Heard it transfers at 10GB/s. At the moment that's a BluRay movie in 30 Seconds. And plans for it to increase to 100GB/s within the next 10 years.

Also notable is that it can be used in Exchanges to speed up internet connections and phone calls/SMS...
Click to expand...

Just so you know, it's not 10 gigabytes a second, it's 10 gigabits (gbps), it's more like 1.5GB/s.

Kind Regards
 
jesaja said:
You're missing the point: There is no designated monitor connector, just a bunch of LP connectors, where you can plug in whatever you want, as long as it comes with LP - be it monitors, drives, network routers, whatever. The computer now recognizes what you have plugged in and internally routes the data from the port to he right places and back automatically.

Jojo
Click to expand...

For some reason, I think this would have some sort of negative impact on performance as opposed to just having dedicated ports. I hope I'm wrong.
 
knowing apple though, you will only get one connector on anything but the top of the line models
 
Video Capture

Since Light Peak is bi-directional and allows for video streams, would this mean that finally we will be able to capture video (from video camera, BluRay Player, other computer or source). That would be great news for anyone who does live video stuff. I can only imagine hooking up couple sources to my laptop and using it as a video mixer for VJing or simply capturing raw HD video to drive.
 
What is driving the need :)

Exciting products are driving this innovation.

Beyond just the natural progression and evolution of speed,
It's the Apple engineers in their labs developing products that drive the need for the capabilities of this connection.
The end result is game changing products we use the way Steve sees us wanting to use them.

Just when companies think they get a foot in the game with Apple, Apple changes the playing field.
 
I love the fact that they used Mac OS X to demo this technology. Not Windows, which has the 80+% market share, or some flavor of Linux. If Apple did design this, it isn't a big surprise; Apple really likes optical, what with having optical audio in/out even on the iMac and laptops.

I don't see any problem with confusing devices. Like other peripheral bus standards, I'm sure that devices will have identifiers (how long before Palm spoofs an Apple ID :D ) Note, that the demo referred to one of the components in the system as a router, so traffic gets sent where it needs to be, I would guess.

As for other companies not adopting it, I don't think that will be a problem, if handled correctly. First, fewer connectors means less complexity for devices. (e.g. a quad interface external drive vs a single interface). Apple was smart to take this to Intel. Intel's got the R&D to really develop this and has the respect of the Windows world. Not charging for the port, like FireWire, would also help adoption. Granted, legacy equipment will mean older ports being on machines for a while (P/S 2, anyone?).

Can't wait to see it in production.
 
Guess the hard drive manufacturers are happy. Time to upgrade all those USB, fw400 & fw800 etc connected back up disks. I'm looking foreward to LP, but it will be costly
 
SirOmega said:
I guess it would be possible to just have the PCI-E card push the video back to the motherboard and have it available to output on any of the LP ports on the mobo. 1920x1200x36b (12b/channel) is 83Mb/s on a 5,000Mb/s PCI-E-2 x16 channel. 2560x1600x36b is 150Mb/s.
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It's 83 Mbit per frame, not per second (unless a refresh rate of 1 Hz is enough). At the usual 60 Hz, the data rate would be 4977 Mbit/s. This is why HDMI 1.3 introduced data rates up to 8 Gb/s (original HDMI allowed 4 Gb/s on a single-link connection).

On the other hand, if you have onboard graphics, linking the GPU to the LightPeak connector with sufficient speed is no real problem. Its only a problem if you want to have swappable graphics cards and they need to use a standard PCI-E interface.
 
xIGmanIx said:
knowing apple though, you will only get one connector on anything but the top of the line models
Click to expand...

Understand the sentiment, but eventually, they wouldn't have to make trade-offs between what ports to make available; USB, FW400, & FW800, and display port could each be replaced with a separate LP port. "Could" be; with this design, one port is all that would be necessary, but reality would dictate multiple ports.

What I envision happening, a la the FW 800 port (sort of), is the removal of a port that people are still using.
 
Eidorian said:
This is all starting to make sense now.

Also, I'm glad someone else picked out the ODN reference there. It was glaring for me. :p
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As long as we can align the ODN matrices with the phase inducers, we'll be able to restore warp drive.
 
I guess we know now why usb dropped the optical.
What would be a great move by Apple would be get this built into the magsafe connector and included this new connector as part of the spec, they would have a 6 to 12 month advantage and good drive for adoption.

I can see this going into Monitors first so they could act as one wire docking stations. With a router inside to spin out USB, network (both legacy and LP). Could as also spin out a daisy chain DisplayPort connector.

You could see hotels considering such a thing gives you internet access but you could also watch your movies or they could sell/hire you a movie to watch on the in room TV.

I can see all sorts of people being interested if it was cheap enough.
I hope Australia's Boardband Team are seriously looking at this. 100m cable that sure solves the final yard problem.

All really interesting stuff.
 
This is quite amazing: a true leap of connectivity.

Seems things are changing again. If this is used in a tablet arriving in only a few months, I'd be surprised. It would make sense, but seems expensive at this time for a tablet looking to be cheaper than Macbooks already slated to reduce in price.

jicon said:
Kinda underwhelmed...

Yes, it is faster speed, but the cabling/connectors look quite pricey.
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Bet you would have been impressed if Ballmer invented it.
So would I, actually.

The reason anything is expensive is because it is made with rare materials or rare manufacturing technique. If this becomes a standard connector, cables will be cheap as dirt and everyone will make them... most likely.
 
arn said:
here's a video of Intel demoing it on a Mac Pro (torn down)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khPx1dEIPnA

arn
Click to expand...

cameronjpu said:
So what happens when I plug my external hard drive into my monitor connector?
Click to expand...

If you all watch the brief video that Arn linked too you would see that the motherboard (?) has a light peak "router" on it so all traffic from the cables will probably go through the router and be directed to/from the correct component.

Think of light peak as a high speed freeway, an autobahn so to speak for a computer, the road surface is the cable, the on/off ramps are the devices, you don't identify yourself to the road, it just acts as the method of transmission, you can drive anything you like on the road, bike, car, truck, bus, horse & cart or just walk. The road doesn't care, it just allows you to move.

When data is transmitted from the device (on ramp) to the OS components (off ramp) it follows a repeatable path, so basically you have vehicles going back and forth between two points on the highway.

I would presume that the devices might need to identify themselves, I think USB devices do something like this anyway.

I don't see manufacturers having many issues with implimenting it, they will love having only one cable type, just of different lengths. Companies like Apple & Sony will be the likely leaders as they are the premium brands so the extra cost of such technology won't %% wise throw the prices off too much.

It would be interesting to see if this could be pushed further to all audio/video technology and replace HDMI and all the other connectors we have now, one cable type for all your home computer & audio/video needs is a perfect world. And on such a large scale the economies of scale would occur pretty fast on the basic cables.
 
Wonderful! Light Peak sure looks like it has potential, and will avoid the USB/Firewire problems of the past. I am glad that Apple seems to be stepping up first working with Intel to get this to be a universal standard, and not just a proprietary Apple one first. With Intel on board, Apple can exploit Light Peak in their many electronics products, and the ramp up of scale should reduce this optical equipment pricing for both vendors and customers alike.
 
MattInOz said:
I guess we know now why usb dropped the optical.
What would be a great move by Apple would be get this built into the magsafe connector and included this new connector as part of the spec, they would have a 6 to 12 month advantage and good drive for adoption.

I can see this going into Monitors first so they could act as one wire docking stations. With a router inside to spin out USB, network (both legacy and LP). Could as also spin out a daisy chain DisplayPort connector.

You could see hotels considering such a thing gives you internet access but you could also watch your movies or they could sell/hire you a movie to watch on the in room TV.

I can see all sorts of people being interested if it was cheap enough.
I hope Australia's Boardband Team are seriously looking at this. 100m cable that sure solves the final yard problem.

All really interesting stuff.
Click to expand...
The overall potential of Light Peak is insane! All data/media/power/networking via one single port and cable, capable of transferring 10 Gb/sec by this time next year, and 100 Gb/sec in the not so distant future. This changes the entire playing field, especially for editing HD media on the fly, and for multitasking and coordinating hard drives and interfaces at "light speeds." LP is well beyond game changing - it's game defining.
 
Pricing?

Has anyone seen what the target pricing for this is supposed to be? In the video listed in the comments the tech guy says it's an order of magnitude cheaper than a 10Gbps telecom switch.... but I don't know what those cost.

I know that the USB 3 spec for a while was going to be optical but they changed it because both optical switchs and optical cables were way to expensive.

Personally I'd love to see USB/Firewire/eSATA all get replaced with one standard.... How much is the hub going to cost though that turns one or two LightPeak ports into enough to run multiple external drives, monitors, keyboards, etc... The nice thing about USB is it's dirt cheap. Then how much is the hub going to cost that turns a LightPeak connector into a 4 USB ports or 4 Firewire ports?
 
Wow! How awesome is this? I hope this results in the end of USB, Firewire, Ethernet, etc. as well as some internal cables too.

I would expect the transmit/receive units would be comparatively expensive, at least for a while, but the cables should be dirt cheap, with almost no limit to the length they can be made.

I'm disappointed it only runs at 10 Gbit/s, and taking 10 years to get to 100. In terms of optical communications, that is pretty pathetic (although granted not for such a small unit). Hopefully with some further miniaturisation and research Intel should be able to kick it up to a Tbit/s before too long.
 
The problems I see

To completely replace USB it is going to have to be cheap to license and cheap to manufacture. No one is going to want to buy something like a wired mouse if the Light Peak chip and emitter costs the manufactures $10 to produce/license.

The other problem is how am going to charge all my devices with Light Peak? Someone had better figure out wireless charging or build induction pads in my computer and ipod.
 
lostngone said:
The other problem is how am going to charge all my devices with Light Peak? Someone had better figure out wireless charging or build induction pads in my computer and ipod.
Click to expand...

There's nothing wrong with sticking a pair of copper wires alongside the fibre optic cables. DC charging cables can be very long without losing much power, and of course will not significantly affect the cost of the cables.
 
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