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Joseph Kool

macrumors newbie
Jan 10, 2011
5
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I intend to buy a new Mac - probably an iMac - to finally replace my old and crawling G4 tower. I think I may hold out for the next release with the prospect of Sandy Bridge, but is this something else I should be waiting for?

You'll be waiting atleast until 2012 at the earliest. Not worth the wait imho
 

res1233

macrumors 65816
Dec 8, 2008
1,127
0
Brooklyn, NY
I really wouldn't make it a deciding factor tbh. How many of your devices, or any device come to think of it currently require 10gbit/s? It'll be a good 3-4 years before it gets widely adopted assuming Apple even decided to adopt it. It's a Display Port killer, which may be a big issue for Apple given how much they have invested into it.

Except lightpeak was Apple's idea...
 

triggs

macrumors newbie
Nov 11, 2009
17
0
How many Volts and how many Amps can Light Peak deliver? No matter how fast a cable is, if it can't power a hard drive at 7200 RPM, it's pointless! That's the problem with USB, it delivers so little power (5 volts and 500mA I think) that any hard drive you connect to it is either slow or requires a bulky power adapter. I think that in the future, portable hard drives should not require separate power adapters to run fast.

In the future, portable hard drives will be flash memory based.
 

Eric M

macrumors member
Nov 18, 2009
53
0
UK
it's the ammount of bulls*it...

They just can't make the tech that would surpass everything that we know today speed-wise and other-wise :)
The whole idea behind the IT/patent world is to implement the changes one by one so everyone can be satisfied...
It is simply to early to adopt fiber-optic tech in to products designed for home users. Connectors, interfaces and tech behind the FB has been around for years now and it is in fact not as expensive to implement in to consumer's machines as the companies would like you to believe. It's just more profitable to dose the tech bit by bit...a little upgrade here, a speed bump there, new interface every 10 or so years. Welcome to the world of shareholding, marketing and bulls*it selling...
In short, the tech is there,they just want to milk all other options first.
:apple:
 

akm3

macrumors 68020
Nov 15, 2007
2,252
279
Lets call it what it really is - FireWire 2.0

Does LightPeak power peripherals and allow daisy chaining like FireWire? (I honestly don't know the answer).

I know USB 3.0 allows power but not daisy chaining. So USB 3.0 for me is actually a big step forward to giving back what FireWire already had.
 

jp102235

macrumors regular
Apr 20, 2010
126
0
western us
What you're thinking of is copper medium using RF signals (multi-frequency signal) like your TV cable uses, where the outside edge of the conductor is the highest frequency and the inside of the conductor is the lowest frequency and your receiver uses "channels" to read the different frequencies of your signal.

Ethernet is basically electrical wire. As long as it has continuity, it doesn't give a damn.
ABSOLUTELY FALSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ethernet is twisted pair(s) - the electrodynamics of which I do not want to get into (it was an undergrad homework assignment years ago). While it may be physically wire, the geometry of the wire is absolutely crucial to its bandwidth capability.
j
 

Marx55

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jan 1, 2005
1,916
753
Intel (and Apple) should make Light Peak the right way:

Capable of Target Disk Mode (as FireWire on Mac).
Capable of cold booting (as previously possible with USB and older Macs via the keyboard or dongles like the i-Cue).

Then Light Peak will be perfect!
 

motulist

macrumors 601
Dec 2, 2003
4,235
611
Remember the old SCSI cables that could only be 3 feet max for good performance? That sucked.

SCSI was awful. I mean, it was much better than anything else available at the time, but man, SCSI was seriously temperamental and required serious voodoo to get it working at all in the first place. Should this device be terminated? Unterminated? Set as a slave device with jumpers? etc.?
 

zin

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2010
491
6,617
United Kingdom
*puts tinfoil hat on*

It's been 6 years since the Apple-Intel partnership (for the Intel switch-over) was revealed. There are six letters in "copper" and "eleven" (2011)! The second partnership will be revealed in due course.

*takes tinfoil hat off*
:cool:
 

emvath

macrumors regular
Jan 5, 2009
223
187
Have they addressed the power flaw in lightpeak yet? (I.E It has none.)

I'm all for Light peak - its fast. But without power it halves its usefulness. A portable hard drive requires a power over usb. It'd be pointless to use light peak and have a second cable plugged into a USB socket to get power to the device.

Surely if they plan to roll it out on copper it would be wise to use it for standard 5v power like USB does? Even intel said they wanted to use copper along side the fibre to get power to the device.

As much as we all want 10 or 100 gbps, the technology doesn't feel ready. They seem to be skimping on the important parts just to get it to market as quick as possible :/

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have solved the issue of power for Light Peak! All you need to do is attach a little solar-power array at the receiver and the little light pulses will power up all your accessories! Intel / Apple, please send the check to my PO box.
 

doctor-don

macrumors 68000
Dec 26, 2008
1,604
336
Georgia USA
Neither am I. Copper is a logical move from Intel if they want LP to be more than just geeks' wet dream. Fiber might have made it too expensive to be used in mainstream computers (such as Macs, excluding Mac Pro), so in order to make LP affordable by normal people, they had to use copper.

I would rather take 30$ "Copper Peak" @10Gb/s than 800$ "Fiber Peak" @10Gb/s.

Is fiber REALLY that much more expensive? I am using fiber for audio from my TV as well as from my computer to my sound system. It cost less that most USB 2.0 cables.

Copper = cheaper

I am not surprised.

Copper may have been cheaper in the past, but not now.

How many Volts and how many Amps can Light Peak deliver? No matter how fast a cable is, if it can't power a hard drive at 7200 RPM, it's pointless! That's the problem with USB, it delivers so little power (5 volts and 500mA I think) that any hard drive you connect to it is either slow or requires a bulky power adapter. I think that in the future, portable hard drives should not require separate power adapters to run fast.

One more reason to use SSD in place of HDD.
 

MagnusVonMagnum

macrumors 603
Jun 18, 2007
5,193
1,442
This confused me when I read about, I thought the point of lightpeak was that it was optical, I didn't even know they could substitute in copper.

It sounds like a bad idea to me and seems to be coming more out of pricing issues rather than any type of long-term compatibility plan. Basically, unless the ports are optical AND copper from Day 1, you're going to have a situation whereby future devices will have to support both connectors in order to be backwards compatible with version 1 devices or some kind of adapter (we all know what a PITA it is to have to get a FW400 adapter to use on a FW800 port because they couldn't think ahead for the FW800 connector). You'd eventually have "Light Peak" cables that are optical and those that are copper and stores would have to carry two lines indefinitely since you could never get rid of the copper cables once introduced.

As for expense, it's hard to believe they cost THAT much. Toslink optical cables are around $1 a foot or less from online stores. Retail stores GOUGE the public on ANY kind of cable these days except maybe RCA. HDMI 1.4 (copper) cable is also less than $1 a foot online, but you'd never guess it at a place like Best Buy (I just bought a high quality 33 foot cable for $27 online).

2011 will be the yr of the single port MBP (not including magsafe) with a lightpeak dock offering numerous USB 3.0 ports, triple FW800, eSATA, twin ethernet, optical in/out, hdmi and displayport.

Who would want to have to carry a dock around just to use common ports that you need on a daily basis? That sounds like more of a hassle than a benefit, IMO. Having a dock to add MORE common ports through Lightpeak isn't a bad idea, but a Macbook without USB ports on it to connect such basic things as wired mice and keyboards would be a nightmare, IMO. I wouldn't buy one. They could run the ports internally off the same buss if they wanted to, but I think any notebook is going to need a number of standard connectors for some time to come (at least USB, Audio and Ethernet).

ABSOLUTELY FALSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ethernet is twisted pair(s) - the electrodynamics of which I do not want to get into (it was an undergrad homework assignment years ago). While it may be physically wire, the geometry of the wire is absolutely crucial to its bandwidth capability.
j

I'm not sure shouting absolutely false out will change the fact that they're still conductors (and thus not "absolutely" false). All wire has some kind of geometry, BTW so I don't know that you can infer anything either way about his rather generic statement (which seemed to be about optical versus electrical conductor, not types of conducting cables). In any case, there's nothing complex about "twisted wire" or why it's done. Each conductor will tend to pick up the same levels of interference and other effects. By using equal and opposite pairs of conductors, the difference of a signal between the two can be removed at the destination. Crosstalk becomes a problem with nearby conductor pairs interfering with each other so by twisting the two conductors uniformly, the crosstalk is exchanged with the opposite wire at every twist and thus keeps the crosstalk common mode and easily rejected at the destination.

SCSI was awful. I mean, it was much better than anything else available at the time, but man, SCSI was seriously temperamental and required serious voodoo to get it working at all in the first place. Should this device be terminated? Unterminated? Set as a slave device with jumpers? etc.?

I think you're confusing SCSI with PATA (aka "IDE"). SCSI devices didn't use "slave" devices and only the last drive in the chain needed any termination (if at all). SCSI devices were set by "ID" and therefore were set to a number from 0-7 (on older SCSI interfaces like the Amiga; this went to 16 total devices on newer interfaces). Setting a number could be as simple as a set of numbered dip switches on a given device. If you could count from 0-7, it wasn't that hard. SCSI is still in use today (mostly in professional usage) and typically uses serial cables now or even Ethernet for external devices.
 
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