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

[hmmfe]

There are compromises here. The video from the Intel lab showed a telecom switch, which if I recall, the 1Gbps switches used to cost around $40,000 ten years ago, back when I was installing fiber.

Not exactly sure what you mean by a telecom switch (could mean many things) but gigabit ethernet back in 1999 was virtually brand new. A 24-port 1000-SX switch today costs around $10,000. Either way, what does this have to do with Light Peak? Light Peak uses different optics and components and is suppose to be significantly cheaper than say OC-192 optics often used in telecom.

watching the connector ends to ensure it is cut correctly, and unlike CAT5, you won't be seeing easy to install connectors with length of cable.

Since the new interface would be used for display, USB/Firewire replacement, etc. When did you ever terminate you own VGA cable or Firewire cable? I'd agree about networking, but most people buy factory terminated patch cables as they are much more reliable and durable.

Sounds eerily like fiberchannel networking, which hasn't exactly taken off on the desktop/portable scale due to cost.

Seriously? Fibre Channel for desktop use? Do you understand the purpose of Fibre Channel? Kinda like saying an Airbus A380 hasn't taken off for commuting 15 miles to work due to cost. Can that really be considered a criticism?

 

[JohnDoe98]

I say that we will only need 2 kinds of cables in the future. One port like the LP that has wicked fast data transfers and can be used with almost anything. Use this for hard drives, display connectors and the like.

We also need something USB like where as the data isn't as fast but it has power going through it. We would use keyboards, mice, and other usb things that need power.

If they could stick the wires for power into the LP without hindering it much then That wold be all that we will ever need (at least for the next few decades)

The LP cables will have power wires in them to power devices, as for mice and keyboards, those will be wireless via bluetooth. So, the only two kinds of cables we will need will be this one and your basic power cable for the computer. But Intel is working on that too so soon we won't need to be physically connected to a power source. Google Intel Wireless Power or just visit the WiTricity webpage.

 

[lostngone]

Copper will not catch up. The only electrical technology that is known about that has a hope of beating optical is carbon nanotubes, and that is a long way off. A single copper cable simply cannot contain such high frequency signals over any useful distance without a huge input of power, which will most likely lead to the copper melting. Optical systems do not have this problem.

Huh? as far as 10Gb is concerned copper has exceeded that transfer speed years ago. Yes fiber has advantages but in this case you could easily handle the throughput of Light Peak with copper.
What do you consider "any useful distance" If we are talking about Desktop computing I would say ~150 feet would be more then adequate.
Also to say Optical transport does not have any attenuation problems is flat out wrong.

 

[TheMechanic]

Choosing automatic syncing puts a local copy on your desktop. I just put symbolic links to it. Does that answer your question?

Yes, thank you!
And when you edit a file on your iDisk and only there, or you add a new file to the iDisk, will the changes be synced back to your local machine?
Sorry, maybe I should just try it out myself with the mobileme trail...

 

[crackpip]

Dude, WHAT! we use AC power because DC loses soooooooo much juice over distance...

There's nothing special about AC in terms of power loss during transmission. What was special about AC was the ease of transforming between low and high voltage. That was more than 100 years ago; the technology has been around for more than 50 years to efficiently step-up and step-down DC voltage. You can now transmit DC electricity just as far with less power loss.

crackpip

 

[Heijtink]

And now wireless

This all great and all. But I'm not thrilled until we see these speeds wirelessly. I mean I would be ready to carve out my wall so I can use these wires to run through my home, if it wasn't such a hassle to do that. The only arena that I am interested in having such a speeds is between two computers and a computer and my tv. So I can finally boot off the network. Have video's and music stream without a problem etc. I hate wires. Don't give me reasons why I should have them. Give me more reasons why I shouldn't have them. 802.11n was a good reason. But that still isn't good enough.

 

[mgilks]

Looks a bit Sci-Fi (ish)... But if it's as good as it seems to be, I can't wait to see it in the MBP!

 

[toke lahti]

and like Classic, Mac will eventually drop support for the rest of the mess;
Like anything else this will be ubiquitous and the costs will drop quickly. Like any new product, say, BR players, for instance-now under $100, [although based on VERY poor sales- DVD Q1,2, 2009: $5 billion vs $410 million BR-we may see the end of its use for movies soon-and its likely to get worse in this economy-and with a billion still breathing/eating DVD players out there- hell-even DDL/VOD sales have left BR in the dust: closing in on $1 billion in sales*]
On a pie chart, BR has roughly 4% sales vs 11% DDL/VOD vs 85% DVD; Possible clue: Why still no BR announcement from the coming major iMac refresh, As a storage medium? Again, why has Apple not yet taken the byte? The DDL/VOD numbers hint at CLOUD.
*www.videobusiness.com Marketing

I believe that BD will be success after all the hurt that was in the bag.
So do some others:
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6698792.html?desc=topstory
If you look at this:
http://www.videobusiness.com/info/CA6673480.html
you can see that "digital" increased 21%, BD rentals +62% & BD sales +91%.
It's all about price for mainstream consumers. When BD isn't notably more expensive than dvd, people prefer higher quality.
Next year everybody will be buying BDs, while broadband won't grow much to increase "digital". It is still faster to grab a player from nearest store than dig fiber all the way to home. And a lot cheaper.

Btw, what support Apple has dropped in recent years after floppy disk? ADC?

 

[toke lahti]

Huh? as far as 10Gb is concerned copper has exceeded that transfer speed years ago. Yes fiber has advantages but in this case you could easily handle the throughput of Light Peak with copper.

Advantage of LP is that it has roadmap for 100Gb. That will be very hard for more then adequate distance with copper.
I know nothing about LP's specs, but I'll also guess that it transports DP-micropackets better than ethernet...

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Leave it to Intel to take credit for someone else's technology advancement.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Advantage of LP is that it has roadmap for 100Gb. That will be very hard for more then adequate distance with copper.
I know nothing about LP's specs, but I'll also guess that it transports DP-micropackets better than ethernet...

Nevermind the fact of the sheer physical properties advantages inherent in Fiber versus Copper.

This technology scales.

 

[layte]

Leave it to Intel to take credit for someone else's technology advancement.

From reading the articles, that is hardly a fair assessment of the situation (although to be expected on MR). Apple had a specification, Intel had the technical and engineering prowess to hammer out a physical product from that.

 

[intel]

I've always said... why not have monitors like usb peripherals!
You want another monitor, just plug it in. As long as you have another port, you can ad another monitor. By the looks of things, the usb port can be adapted to suit light peak connector as well. So it's not like there will be too much adaptation to what the external of a laptop or computer will look like.... only that there will be no dvi,hdmi,serial,firewire. Love it, really love it.

 

[Imhotep397]

Firewire disguised...

Sounds like the next generation of Firewire disguised , which kind of sucks in terms of Apple really not getting sufficient credit. If they can get some credit and we can stop ignoring the fact that USB sucks because the "New Firewire" will become the standard I'm all for it.

 

[waloshin]

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...

Yes, but can your harddrive write that fast?

 

[illegallydead]

Bold and smart move by Apple. They already have a stake in the music distribution business and are gaining control of that market.

Now is Apples move into the HD video market. Light Peak is one step to assist the elimination of Blu-ray. Video on disc media is so 1980's. We have moved away from /retrieve disc from storage case/eject/place disc on tray/load/press play. Media is much more convenient at your finger tip when you just point and click. Who will need Netflix or even Wal-mart if DRM free high quality media can be quickly downloaded from Apple via Light Peak?

The future is fiber and wireless. Light Peak is part of the Apple strategic plan to dominate everything that is not wireless. Other legacy connectors are dying. Hulu variants are replacing cable tv, so give me Light Peak to finally kill it off. Cellphone replaced plain old telephone lines so give me Light Peak to kill of the legacy ISP and telecommunication over copper. HDMI has already saturated the market and will take a while to die. However, when video/audio/storage medium/internet/telecommunication/all forms of media have adapted Light Peak, Apple will have made a bundle from just the licensing portion of its use alone. DRM shall also play a role in this. How? We shall have to wait and see.

USB is here to stay. It will remain the copper connection of choice for wired keyboards, mice and flash drives. Copper will not die it will just not be used for everything.

You must not have read the article. LP has a distance maximum. It is meant for local (in-house) connections. Telecoms are already using fibre-optic connections and have been for years (due to scalablity: same fibre can trasmit as much as the back-end tech can deliver it. You WILL NOT be getting LP from your telecom. Not to mention servers have been and always will be the bottleneck. No matter how fast you hook-up, joe-shmoes website cannot push info down the pipe to millions of people that fast.

Dude, WHAT! we use AC power because DC loses soooooooo much juice over distance...

I had to put the inverter for my wind generator in the attic because I was losing too much juice with it in the basement.

There aren't gonna be copper leads running with the fiber it's not economical. The cables would be immensely expensive and face it, they're not using this to supplement USB... this is inevitably for use from powered device to powered device (like a monitor or external HDD or a network interface for your computer..) This will most likely connect devices that have their own power supplies...

Dude, what? You realize that the US uses DC for most of it's long-distance transmission lines, right? I imagine your turbine doesn't kick out high enough voltages or something; DC transmission done right is very very good for very long distances. We use AC power because it was marketed better way way back in the day.

Anyway, back on topic, if this is to take off, I imagine that they will throw a copper pair in there for power needs. Constraining it to powered devices would only hinder its take-off as a do-all-end-all cable. Why exactly is it (copper) not economical? Copper is dirt cheap (for now, granted), glass for the fibre is relatively dirt cheap. There shouldn't be any reason why running the two together would be a problem. One is infrared optical, one is DC electrical. They should have no reason to interfere with one another.

 

[illegallydead]

Sounds like the next generation of Firewire disguised , which kind of sucks in terms of Apple really not getting sufficient credit. If they can get some credit and we can stop ignoring the fact that USB sucks because the "New Firewire" will become the standard I'm all for it.

Please realize that your misguided "apple not really getting sufficient credit" idea is a good thing. Apple "getting credit" = royalties. Royalties = more money = more likely to be like FireWire: great and all, but will never reach USB levels of adoption.

 

[Imhotep397]

...The big question is why is Intel promoting USB 3.0 if they have Light Peak coming around the corner (2010). And why did Apple (who has never been afraid to develop a new standard) have Intel develop it?

Somehow this story doesn’t add up.

It adds up. Apple has been trying to do this with the firewire standard for quite a few years...probably since the beginning of firewire. You can see the early fruits with Apple's early generation iPods that had "Combo" connectors that allowed you to plug iPods into USB or firewire interfaces and ADI. The problem for Apple has been that because Intel flatly refused to integrate Firewire or ADI into their mainboard specs every year they would not become a standard which meant that costs and adoption would never get to point that was acceptable and Apple would have to have another set of legacy technologies that would only be supported internally. Light Peak represents a way for Apple to backdoor legacy technologies into a standard that will be part of every Intel mainboard/chipset that's released after 2010. USB has always been inferior to firewire in terms of sustained throughput and just data transfer speed in general, but because Intel is the big dog they just muscled the standard through. From my perspective I see USB 3 really representing them supporting both the technology that's already out there and their employees that have been working on USB for several years. Intel also wants to have the option to back out because they don't totally own the standard.

 

[Warbrain]

I'll say this...

I cannot wait to see it and try it out myself. It'll be great.

 

[bigwig]

I'd love for this to replace the misbegotten hack that is HDMI. You can't get a reliable connection longer than about 10 feet which really constrains how you design a room for video. With LP the problem goes away.

I don't see LP replacing cat5/6 in home or small/medium business networking applications. They are relatively inexpensive and scale up to 10Gb Ethernet. That's plenty of bandwidth, you'd need a big server like an SGI Altix and hundreds of clients to get anywhere near saturating it. That's not likely in a home or small/medium sized business.

 

[kironin]

Well, if this comes out in 2010, it'll make SATA3.0/eSATA/USB3/FW3200 all redundant before they get mainstream.

It might get a tad confusing if every connector on the computer has the same shape.

shapes are already confusing.

Just color code.

 

[Neotyguy40]

I have a question:

Couldn't they put optical semiconductors into processors? That would reduce the heat and allow many processors to go beyond the 4.0 GHz limit without turning it into molten metal.

I mean, just until they can figure a cheap way to make Diamond Semiconductors.

 

[Jamo12]

shapes are already confusing.

Just color code.

What about color blind people?

 

[wackymacky]

Dude, WHAT! we use AC power because DC loses soooooooo much juice over distance...

I had to put the inverter for my wind generator in the attic because I was losing too much juice with it in the basement.

There aren't gonna be copper leads running with the fiber it's not economical. The cables would be immensely expensive and face it, they're not using this to supplement USB... this is inevitably for use from powered device to powered device (like a monitor or external HDD or a network interface for your computer..) This will most likely connect devices that have their own power supplies...

Sure but for a metre or two ie for a mouse or keyboard cable it might make sence.

(Though I can't see USB completely disappearing as it works well with a lot of non expensive peripheral devices.)

 

[wackymacky]

What about color blind people?

They should pass a law that all cables should have braille on them.

It would help when you're reaching behind somethong like your Hi-F!.