Possible Replacement for USB 3.0, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, eSATA Coming in 2011
I usually don’t write posts about new technology, but a new technology from Intel might be quite disruptive to current connection technologies. Meet Intel Light Peak 🙂 Gone will be the days of copper wires, Light Peak is an optical connection technology. Up until now, optical connections are only used by data centers that require huge amount of bandwidth and are also rather expensive. Intel’s Light Peak solves all this; it will be cheap and consumer friendly. The bend radius of the Light Peak optical cables is very small. You can bend the optical fiber around a pencil without disturbing the optical path.
Light Peak only provides a bidirectional physical transport medium and is designed such that almost any protocol can run on top of it. This means it could be used to transport USB, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, FireWire, SCSI, PCI Express etc simultaneously over a single optical fiber! Light Peak also supports quality of service (QoS) and is hot pluggable. Initial bandwidth will be 10Gbit/sec. This is without any WDM (wavelength division multiplexing). Intel claims it is not too difficult to scale Light Peak up to 100Gbit/sec 🙂 To put 10Gbit/sec into perspective (Quotes from Intel):
At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds.
If you had an MP3 player with 64GB of storage, it would only take a minute to fill it up with music using Light Peak at 10Gbps.
If all the books in the Library of Congress were digitized, they would amount to over 20 terabytes of data (a 2 with 13 zeroes after it). If you used Light Peak technology operating at 10 Gb/s, you could transfer the whole library of congress in less than 35 minutes.
Light Peak connections can be daisy chained or can use a star topology and work upto 100 meters, might be reduced to 50 meters for the final product. Even at ‘only’ 50 meter, it’s much beter than technologies like HDMI, DVI, USB and so on.
I’m really looking forward to Light Peak. No more messing around with different kind of cables to connect your monitor or external harddisk or anything else. Just 1 single cable to connect anything you want.
Intel expects to see Light Peak in PCs and peripherals in 2011 🙂
