Comments

Sep 23  |  Michael A Senay said:

Think about the energy savings of this too!

Sep 24  |  Igor Nikolaev said:

Imho all photos was photoshoped. Why not connected all contacts on worked device? Star-wars light ray from fiber ends lotred me ;-)

Sep 26  |  Duff said:

Why does this not provide for power? an extra copper cable to provide electricity? Yer, it’s great that we’re getting rid of all these other cables, that i’ll only have that one cable… as well as a power cable! think about plugging in a USB cable for your phone, great, now we have to plug in the Light Peak Cable, as well as a power cable? it’s brilliant that we get faster speeds, but what about power? sure, years down the track we won’t need power cables, but if it’s being deployed in 2010, i’m pretty sure my iPhone will still need to be charged!

Please Please PLEASE! some one look at this deficit in the technology, i’d hate to see this technology fail because everyone has to choose between getting one cable to charge and sync, or two cables, individually charging and syncing! sure i’ll have to leave my phone plugged in for that little bit longer for it to charge, but that’s better than having to plug one cable in to sync, then wait for it to be done (regardless of how quickly that is) and come back to unplug it to charge it, then realize i forgot to sync something so i have to change the cables over again!

NOT COOL!

Sep 27  |  beez1717 said:

after reading and learning about this technology I was very excited about this and thought about uses, and I can see using these cables to connect external hard drives for quick painless backup via mac Os 10.5 and 10.6’s time machine. I can also see this used to get faster displays and to transfer music and videos to an ipod and iphone at high speeds :)

Sep 27  |  Jeremy said:

How does the latency and interrupt tolerance compare to conventional technologies (particularly display and audio interconnects)? Can this technology support even cheaper and simpler connectors for dumb peripherals?

Sep 27  |  oomu said:

I hope you will succeed and Apple will be able to use it to improve computing as ever.

Sep 28  |  alan geering said:

I work with digital audio electronics. Firewire has for a long time been the connection of choice when moving audio and video in real time. USB is usually only used when the datarate required is much less than the total USB provides.

Will lightpeak be master-slave or peer-peer in architecture? Will real time applications be able to reserve bandwidth?

Basically, how apporpriate will lightpeak be for connecting multichannel digital mixers/A-D converters to computers for recording?

Currently I use a mix of Firewire (32 channels 24 bit @ 48khz), USB (4 channels 24 bit at 96khz) and PCI adapters with inputs for many channels (via ADAT, TDIF, AES, etc.).

An aside: Comparing some (admittedly older generation) optical fibres with copper cables I’ve some concerns. Only the latter survived being crushed by a ladder. Copper cables have a toughness I worry optical fibres might not. What has been done to mitigate this in the design of Light Peak?

Sep 28  |  C said:

I’m a photographer and not an engineer.

One of the issues with digital photography today is high ISO noise (i.e., digital artifacts when shooting in low light conditions). Since (light) signal is weak in low light conditions, noise is high due to signal amplification in the sensor (particularly in the Blue channel). Noise is also generated from sensor heat (byproduct of an electrical current).

So, I got to thinking about whether this technology can be incorporated into the design of the camera’s sensor (i.e., switch from an electric signal to an optical signal) and whether doing so would both reduce noise and increase the sensitivity and light efficiency of a sensor for better photographs in low light situations?

Also, is it possible to incorporate this technology into the camera’s internal circuitry and into the memory cards as a way to free up the memory buffers and speed up the write times so one can shoot continuously without stopping?

That would be awesome if it’s doable.

Sep 29  |  Neil said:

This system is designed to work upto 100m

Adding power cables to such a length would not be a good idea due to the loss of power due to resistance over such a lenght of cable.

However for short distances, they should have the possibility to provide power. And maybe to add power locally for long cable distances.

Mind you with ‘wireless’ power you won’t need a power cable soon, plus solar capabilities starting to come out.

Sep 29  |  Britt said:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a locking variant of the plug! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called over because some HDD or peripheral has gone “missing” and all it was was that they knocked the USB cable loose!

Also, PLEASE make sure that it can do DMA and isochronous transfers like firewire does…

Oh, and one other thing — can we get an open, no-cost device ID scheme? To get a USB ID number, you have to pay $4000 per year to the USB-IF… small developers can’t afford this. Instead, I would suggest using a domain-name based scheme, kinda’ like Apple does for application identifiers (so for example a device might identify itself as ‘kbd1234.intel.com’ if it was a keyboard controller model 1234 made by Intel — microcontrollers now have the space and performance to support this, we don’t need a small device-id address space like was needed in decades past).

Sep 29  |  john said:

Yeah of course power is the existential question. The really futuristic solution would be light energy running a tiny electrical generator on the other end.

Sep 29  |  Andrew WIlson said:

Dear Ben: Please would you e-mail me some technical specifications about the Light Peak device shown in Jason Ziller’s video. Many thanks - Andy

Sep 29  |  Jon L said:

Obviously this will have a sender/receiver setup which will be powered on each end… As in, one box to plug your display, mouse, drive, etc. into, which has it’s own power brick to provide power where necessary. ??

What type of fiber cable ends will this tech use? LC? SC? New proprietary?

Hmm…

Sep 30  |  jose DA SILVA said:

Dear Ben I am very interested on this technology, both due to the package and the bandwidth. I would like to have more information and even have a test-setup of such a link…when you think that it will be possible to have engineering samples? (or even when it will come to market)…I have a immediate application for this link on particle physics applications and also on medical (PET Scanner). please keep me updated on all developments of this light peak tech. Best Regards JC

Sep 30  |  Ben Hacker said:

Thanks for all the comments guys!

@ Michael: There are many possibilities with this technology. Their certainly may be some energy savings in the future.

@ Duff: Power is obviously a requirement for a universal connector, and that is something we are looking at closely. Don’t panic yet!

@ Jeremy: We are not sharing any lower level of technological detail at this time.

@ Alan: I’ll share the same comment as I gave Jeremy above, but these issues are things we are aware of.

Regarding locking cables, and length of optical only, vs. optical+power cables, we are aware of these issues and are looking at various options.

On the other questions about additional specs, and specifica dates, we are not providing details at this time, but please stay tuned going forward.

Thanks,

Ben Hacker Intel Corporation

Oct 03  |  Michael Jahn said:

Hi Ben,

I recall explaining bandwidth and data transfer to my non techie freinds in using a water metaphor.

Think of data as something like water, only it comes in ‘packets’ of watter, each ‘packet’ being about 1 cup - 8 fluid ounces. with that in mind, think of your mouth as your USB Port, firewire, what have you, and your stomach as your harddrive.

While we can reasonably assume that we might be able to sustain and input rate of 2 cups per minute, we simply can change the delivery mechansim from a drinking straw to a garden hose - our “data (fluid) processor may not withstand this increased speed of input. Now, what we seemed to be speaking of is changing out our stomach - actually, the entire digestive system - from what we have to this new technology. It is NOT about simply replacing the garden hose with a fire hose - we can certainly do that, but no ones moth or digestive system can handle fire hose-ish bandwidth, even though the telcos can certainly deliver 42 gig a second today.

The requirement is to change how the stuff INDSIDE can process data. Thats what make this Light Peak so important. Once we have that inside, we can indeed hook up a fire hose up.

Oct 05  |  Anders Sjögren said:

Ben,

when it comes to power is guess it would be easy to take the firewire-path of providing two connector types, one with power and one w/o, i.e. to have power being optional. I guess one problem is that the places where power is needed (cellphones, drives, etc), space AND duriability is also an issue so getting a small and robust connector is a must.

In USB there are two levels of power, right, none of them with enough power for 3.5” drives? It would be ideal if light peak would allow enough power to power even 3.5” drives from it, perhaps using a fatter connector+cable.

Looking forward to the new standard!

Anders Sjögren

Oct 05  |  Bruce Trent said:

Has cabling and/or connectors been tested for military applications and analysis done on the affect of noise/interference created by going through slip rings on gimbaled systems?

Oct 05  |  Jon said:

Ben - Light Peak does look like awesome tech, it’s amazing you’ve got the costs down to consumer levels. Thank you for answering some of the outstanding questions, but I’ve got a few more.

Glad to hear you’ll be adding power over LP, any word on what that might be and over what length? Please provide real power, unlike USB… I’m hoping for at least 12V/1A/12W. In the eliminating cables catagory I would really like to not have to plug my 2TB 3.5” external HD’s into the wall… as well as quickly recharging mobile devices (cameras, phones, etc)… Other I’m sure would like to power external DVD drives… Etc… Don’t short change us in power or this dream of one cable to rule them all will die quickly.

Topology? Is this going to be hubbed or daisy chained? I’m certainly assuming the later but it’d be nice to know… Maybe it can handle both?

The demo showed a connector that looked an awuful lot like USB A, will this be the final design? Seems like you could get much much smaller… Whatever you do please use a keyed shape, unlike USB A / like USB B and FireWire 400. Also some mechanism to reduce pull out would be great, not necessarily a positive lock (no screws, no catch like Ethernet) but something like magsafe or the friction springs on Apples iPod dock connecots (the newer version without buttons).

Oct 13  |  Rob said:

Having read as much as possible about Light Peak including the new Wikipedia entry I am curious about the multi-protocol support. Are the protocols transmitted side by side or is there a whole new method involved? I know that Light Peak is mostly meant for the PC/CE/Mobile sphere but I was thinking of using Light Peak for InfiniBand. What I am trying to ascertain is that since InfiniBand has 24 links at its maximum - 12 in each direction. How would Light Peak be able to accommodate the IB protocol? Would the cable need 24 fibers or would it need fewer fibers to accomplish the same thing?

Thanks

Oct 15  |  John said:

I would appreciate some detail on how Light Peak differs from Intel Connects Cables (now Emcore Connects Cables). It sounds like Light Peak is a new connector and scaled 5Gb/s lanes to 10 Gb/s

Nov 05  |  Struan Robertson said:

What topology will Light Peak support and are any plans being made to increase transmission distances? The extra bandwith is great but from a broadcast production view no more than 100M transmission distance is limiting. 2km and you would be getting there. Single mode SFP,s give you 20km so …. Also will you be able to optically mutiplex Light Peak? Thx

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