Slashdot Mirror
Apple Behind Intel's USB Competitor?
We recently discussed Light Peak, Intel's upcoming, optical interconnect technology that boasts data transfer rates of up to 10 Gbps. While some have speculated that Light Peak will directly compete with USB 3.0, Engadget has now unearthed information that indicates the idea for the technology originated from Apple, who apparently asked Intel to develop it.
"According to documents we've seen and conversations we've had, Apple had reached out to Intel as early as 2007 with plans for an interoperable standard which could handle massive amounts of data and 'replace the multitudinous connector types with a single connector (FireWire, USB, Display interface).' ... Based on what we've learned, Apple will introduce the new standard for its systems around Fall 2010 in a line of Macs destined for back-to-school shoppers — a follow-up to the 'Spotlight turns to notebooks' event, perhaps. Following the initial launch, there are plans to roll out a low-power variation in 2011, which could lead to more widespread adoption in handhelds and cellphones. The plans from October 2007 show a roadmap that includes Light Peak being introduced to the iPhone / iPod platform to serve as a gateway for multimedia and networking outputs."
I can move my special video (porn) collection in 3 second!!!!
Put it on iPods and it becomes ubiquitous almost immediately. They could charge extra for a usb cable or dock.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
So you're saying Apple is behind this new technology coming from intel at their behest but it's all part of a scheme to devise a new technology that will get intel to compete with... intel?
Man, you must REALLY think Steve Jobs is clever! Imagine, getting intel to go into competition with itself!
USB now a days is often used to charge devices too, which is not possible with these optical interfaces. Because of this, I don't think this will have much future for portable devices, so nice try, but I'm not buying it.
"replace the multitudinous connector types with a single connector" = multitudinous connector types + 1;
Maybe, like FireWire, it'll deliver better on its claimed speed, and 10 Gbps will actually be 10 Gbps.
They claim it's pretty durable, of course the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. "The cables themselves are durable, Ziller said: "You can tie a knot in it and it'll still work.""
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Yes.
Transferring a 100 MB app to my iPhone takes a noticeable amount of time, for example. A movie is worse. And things will get MUCH worse in the future, when we have higher resolution portable devices.
And what Apple wants to do with this interconnect is to replace things like DVI/Display Port, Firewire/USB, (e)SATA, etc., all on one bus.
Do you only use it for your mouse and keyboard? If that's the case, then you'll probably be satisfied.
Now, back in the real world, it becomes the bottleneck for even low-end, high-capacity storage devices built around traditional spinning media. With us now moving towards solid-state storage, USB 2.0 fails us horribly. We can only manage 30% to 35% read/write capacity utilization under real-world conditions.
The same goes for connecting high-end visual displays via USB. Once you get above a resolution of 2000 pixels in either direction, USB 2.0 just can't handle it.
USBNET2, basically IP networking over USB 2.0, never took off because it's just too damn slow.
There are many applications where we need much, much faster transfer rates than USB 2.0 can support.
Because you are being scammed, $10 is more realistic.
Gee, Intel, thanks for the complete lack of information on your page. Licencing costs? Connector shape? Power? Protocol overhead?
Though I'll admit, the cheap laser effect and helpful conversion from x bits transfered per second to height of x stacked dollar bills in miles does add a lot of class.
Could we wait with announcing new protocols until there's actual technical information on them to be had?
... cable system, too. It would be passively translated, using exactly the same bit level protocols, etc. It would be slower in most cases, of course. This would be so that metallic connection needs can be seamlessly integrated into the same bus architecture (which I hope fixes the mess they made of USB).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why apple wouldn't choose to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet instead?..
Partly because the first iteration will be 10 Gigabit but the next generation will be 100 Gigabit.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
That's not USB 2.0's fault. The bottleneck is almost certainly the slow/cheap flash memory in the iPhone. Fast flash is expensive.
You don't have to buy a $40 HDMI cable. If the cables you buy are that expensive, then you're just getting fleeced. Do the barest amount of research before you purchase.
Also, the cheap HDMI cables are more expensive than "ethernet patch cables" because of licensing, a more expensive connector, more wires, and more stringent requirements on the quality of materials. The cable costs more than a dollar because it's the equivalent of several CAT-6a cables. It's designed to transmit raw video data at 1920x1080p30. That's roughly 1.4Gbps. The standard even defines faster rates. You'd need 2-3 CAT6a cables to transfer video at that rate and still cover everything else HDMI takes care of.
even better, why did hdmi have 'many wires' when really just 2 opto (even toslink!) cables would have worked.
one for the send and one for the return path. that's it. no ground loops, no cable quality issues, no switch complexity (with parallel wires that have to be *exact length* on the pc board traces).
duh!
I have stopped expecting quality connector and cable standards from computer makers and the industry. sata is a nightmare, sata power is no better than 4pin old style molex drive power, hdmi is a nightmare in its connector and bulk of the cable (it pulls out if you look at it the wrong way).
the last good connector was a db9 style. works, stays put, well keyed, cheap to make and easy to build with. say any of that for any of the modern connector/wire types (you can't).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Even with the criticisms (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagSafe), one thing I've been impressed with Apple on (and there aren't that many) is the MagSafe connector. I've had way too many problems with other connectors wearing out and not working, and occasionally, the the yanking unintentionally almost causing havoc problem.
I'd love to see the next generation data connections (with power transfer) be magnetic. To solve the short problem, the power transfer could be inductive, and the optical connection isn't going to short. I'd be happy to have every single damn cable I ever have to use in the future be some variation of MagSafe.
Dara
IEEE1394 or FireWire or iLink had issues with IP if I recall correctly and it was more than just the name it was known by I think. Will this new thing be even more heavily encumbered by patents? I really with manufacturers would grow a pair and stand up against these emerging "standards" in favor of standards that everyone can use. This is especially true of those that utilize encryption and DRM schemes to control how the technologies are implemented. ("Oh sure! You can use our patented technology for free, but you have to sign here, here and here and remember, you can only use it in ways that we tell you. If you use it to exercise 'Fair Use' rights, then we will yank your license and sue you into the ground.")
USB dominates the peripherals market because it allows for cheep peripherals.
Monitor cables are specialised to not require the monitor to do much work.
Ethernet cables allow high transfer rates between expensive devices.
What is the market for this?
Will it require "expensive" tech on both ends or will the PC be able to do the lifting?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
So... What we're trying to imply here is that this is another Firewire: pretty good (arguably better) but inevitably unable to compete with the ubiquitous USB?
And what Apple wants to do with this interconnect is to replace things like DVI/Display Port, Firewire/USB, (e)SATA, etc., all on one bus.
I think this is probably what Apple is after. As I look at my Macbook Pro, I have the following connectors: MagSave (power), Ethernet, FW800, miniDP, USBx2, SD card, line-in, and headphones. You could probably get rid of Ethernet, FW, miniDP, and USB and replace them with Light Peak. Since I'm rarely using more than two of those at a time, you could probably reduce the number of ports and start shrinking devices.
The other thing that Apple seems to be targeting is the optical drive. I think you're going to see Apple dropping optical altogether, and moving OS delivery to SD cards. Most other software/media will be downloads.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
As soon as the industry settles on Light Peak... Apple will start using the Mini Light Peak connector, which will join the list of other connectors that they minified or adopted:
-Mini DVI
-Micro DVI
-Mini VGA
-Mini Display Port
-Mini Toslink
That seems to be a Windows-only issue. Both OS X and Linux enumerate USB devices almost immediately.
IMHO this is a feature, not a defect; if a device freezes, unplugging it and plugging it back in will often clear up problems.
This used to be a major problem on Windows - i.e., in the early days of USB (be it XP, Win2K, or WinMe or 98SE) plugging a device (such as a printer) into a different port would force it to be redetected, search for and install a driver, etc. then you'd end up with multiple devices installed. It was downright brain-dead in how it handled USB, whereas on Mac OS and OS X It Just Worked(TM), and when Linux gained USB functionality, there It Just Worked(TM).
I'd rather the device be addressed by the device's unique identifier, not by port. Which port a USB device is plugged into should be transparent.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Tie a knot in an optical cable? Colour me skeptical. I am unaware of any optical material with a decent transmissive efficiency that has that kind of flexibility. Perhaps a polymer of some kind, but it will not be able to take that repeatedly, as the optical transmissiveness is dependent upon the material being fairly structurally dense, which rules out extreme flexibility in all of the polymers that I know of.
IMHO optic fibre has no place in consumer gear. The cable lengths do not necessitate them for high speed transmission, the cost of end devices will always be higher than for wire-devices due to the need to modulate to optical signals and back again, and the possibility of getting dust or dirt into the socket or otherwise abusing the equipment is far higher under consumer product conditions.
I hate printers.
I have never known why industry standards such as HD-SDI have never made it to the consumer market. Single coax cable terminated with BNCs that can deliver 4k (four times the resolution of 1080p) or higher with 16 channels of audio, all uncompressed, at a length of over 100m.
I doubt Intel broke an EULA, for what they are worth anyway.
If all this is true, and Apple did ask Intel to develop this initiative, then I'm pretty sure Apple would have been happy to license that version of OS X for development purposes.
In any event, couldn't that motherboard been ripped out of an apple computer?
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
You're wrong. USB is and was for hooking up peripherals like keyboard/mice/printers/low-bandwidth devices to effectively replace the old RS-232 serial and parallel ports of yore. USB was never intended to replace the interface that goes to your monitor, your hard drives*, and your ethernet.
* Yes, we're all aware of USB storage, but see all the comments above about how even low-end devices today can swamp USB... if USB was so great for this then eSATA never would have come into existence.
This new standard appears to be point-to-point and with all the knowledge we have now it will hopefully be efficient. Additionally, 10Gbps is the starter speed... Intel was talking about scaling it to 100Gbps without too much difficulty.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Optical may have outlived its usefulness for storage and backup, but it hasn't outlived its usefulness as a distribution medium. It is a lot cheaper for a software vendor to ship out their software on ~10-cent DVDs rather than ~$5 SD cards or USB drives. Entertainment firms especially like optical disks because in addition to being cheaper, they are also more fragile and harder to use with computers rather than locked-down, purpose-built, stand-alone players. Computers can better do unwanted things like skip the mandatory 30 minutes of previews, transfer the files to another medium, or strip out DRM altogether, so the entertainment firms want to discourage the playback of their files on computers as much as possible. The obvious distribution method of using the Internet is even more unappealing to software and entertainment distributors as they think it makes piracy easier and makes their ridiculous pricing schemes based on "scarcity" look that much more ridiculous.
So while putting things on optical media may be pretty much useless for customers, suppliers love it and that's why we won't see optical media die for a good, long time.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
USB3 is pretty marginal for connecting a monitor. Your average single-link DVI interface has up to 3.96 Gbps of bandwidth, which a typical 1920x1080 LCD @ 60 Hz nearly saturates. USB3 is rated at 5 Gbps but if it's anything like USB2, you'll probably see ~2 Gbps of actual throughput and a huge CPU load. USB2 is horrible as a display interface as it is really only good for connecting small secondary displays to display static 2D images. You have only 480 Mbps of theoretical bandwidth, which is enough to drive only a 640x480 monitor at typical 24-bit color and 60 Hz. If you figure in the fact that USB2 maybe has 200 Mbps in real bandwidth, you see there's a huge bandwidth problem.
USB2 is okay for 100 Mbps Ethernet and there are a lot of USB2 10/100 Ethernet dongles and docks out there. I have one and it works as well as any PCI-based 10/100 Ethernet interface. However, most computers have gigabit Ethernet connections because 12 MB/sec won't cut it for transferring files any more. USB2 won't even come close to cutting it for a GbE replacement, which is why you don't see any USB GbE dongles, only the 10/100 ones.
USB does well for connecting relatively low-speed peripherals like mice, keyboards, printers, and small flash memory devices. It's just not a good replacement for high-bandwidth connections, which will continue to have specialized and much faster cables and connectors.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
If you look at a computer from around 1994, it will probably have all of these and things plugged into most of them. A modern laptop can have the same set of devices all plugged in to a USB hub, connected to a single USB port. This same laptop, however, will probably still have:
USB doesn't yet replace these (some people use USB2 for disks, but it doesn't perform as well as even FireWire 400 in the real world, let alone FireWire 800). This should be able to replace all of them. A laptop in 5 years time would then only need one type of port and, if it's fast enough, then a palmtop with just one of them will be able to drive all of the things that a modern desktop or laptop might have connected.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Techically the bandwidth would be there.
The tricky bit with replacing video with a general purpose interface would be to sort out signal routing inside the computer. There still needs to be a GPU/framebuffer and that GPU needs a high bandwidth path (we are talking a couple of PCIe 1.x lanes worth per display) from the framebuffer to the general purpose interface.
Not saying this couldn't be done but it would definately require cooperation between the GPU vendor and the vendor of the general purpose interface in question to allow them to communicate over PCIe without involving the CPU.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"replace the multitudinous connector types with a single connector" = multitudinous connector types + 1;
This is Apple talking. Since when has Apple bothered with legacy connector support?
HD-SDI never made it to the consumer market because it is expensive to handle and nobodys TV will decode it.
As for the rest of your comment:
"Single coax cable terminated with BNCs that can deliver 4k (four times the resolution of 1080p) or higher with 16 channels of audio, all uncompressed, at a length of over 100m"
No, what you are referring to is 3Gig, which is actually 2 HD-SDI cables and my experience has been that 300 feet out is sometimes a touchy place to be. 3gig on 1 cable = fiber
The iPhone uses cheap MLC NAND flash. If Apple wanted faster flash memory, they could have installed more expensive and faster SLC flash. But it will be a while before Apple puts something the iPhone that will even saturate USB 2.0.
I estimate the flash write speed on my 16GB iPhone 3G to be around 5 megabytes/sec. The iPhone takes at least twice as long to sync the same music as does my old iPod (5G 60 GB, three and a half years old), both using USB 2.0.
A lot of cheap monitors still use VGA cables and PS/2 is still somewhat common.
I have doubts about PS/2 being common at all. But even if the devices still were, there are PS/2 to USB adaptors...
Just like there are DVI to VGA adaptors too. But both of those would be replaced by this connector type.
There's also ethernet, though that's not in any way new.
Also can be currently done over USB, and this new connector.
In addition, external drives are starting to use eSATA, and don't forget there's about 5 different kinds of USB cables.
The multiple types of cables are something the new standard hopefully would do away with, if the connector is small enough (the fact there are that many USB connector types is a crime against humanity).
eSata would also be replaced by this connector (I use eSata today myself). In fact I could see them keeping some legacy ports around because they are so common (USB being a big one) but the eSata connector could easily go away and be replaced by a Light Peak adaptor (or just have Light Peak external cases which would be potentially faster).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
what you clearly meant to say was "bears repeating"
Well, yeah. That goes without saying.
Since the cable can be 100 feet (30+ m), I'd put my computer in the basement, put even bigger fans on it and overclock it a bit more. Then I'd run a cable to my living room TV and bedrooms, so that the whole house can simultaneously use a single computer from many different local monitors/keyboards. It's pretty damn elegant and efficient if you ask me. Since you only need one computer for the house, it's worth it to make it awesome: Multiple CPU sockets, multiple GPUs - this is stuff that has entered the mainstream already. I know there has been work done on making use of non-matching GPU's (article). Now if they could design CPUs to also be on their own little daugterboards like graphics cards are, and huge motherboards with a dozen open slots... then we could just keep adding stuff to our system, and only throw out the weakest stuff once our slots are filled. Motherboards "do" less and less each generation, because more and more is being merged onto the CPU die. Once motherboards become little more than chip-connecting wires, this monstrous fantasy will be complete. I know a lego computer like this would be insanely fast but huge and ugly, which is exactly why it must be in the basement. And since it will be in the basement and producing heat, somebody should design it so that it heats my water!
Apple had to drop FireWire? I don't know if you've looked at an Apple computer recently, but every single Apple computer sold today, with the exception of the entry-level white polycarbonate MacBook has FireWire.
The iPod dock connector is what I believe you're referring to, and while it's proprietary, it's also very well documented for developers and carries a lot more than just plain ol' USB. It has, among other things, pins for FireWire (deprecated on iPods) analogue audio and video and a control channel...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Since they are limiting the cable length to 100 meters you don't need the the same properties a telecom would need in long haul fiber.
Video from Intel's lab with more information is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNoF1SWtSg
Apple wants something better than USB crap. Apple knows Intel has the IP to make something better. Apple lets Intel in on the gig so Intel will be more willing to eventually drop USB. All Apple needs to do is convince Intel that this will be big enough that Intel's share of the booty will still be bigger than USB. That and convince Intel they can't go it alone because Apple controls what goes on the iPods. That way Apple and Intel get to rape the consumer together. This is what you get when people buy based on brand name ... that brand gets to jerk the market around.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars