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Intel Shows Off First Light Peak Laptop
Barence writes "Intel has provided the first hands-on demonstration of a laptop running its Light Peak technology — an optical interconnect that can transfer data at 10Gbit/sec in both directions — at the company's inaugural European research showcase here in Brussels. Intel has fitted Light Peak into a regular USB cable, with optical fibres running alongside the electrical cabling. Intel provided a visual demonstration of how data is passed through the cable by shining a torch into one end of the cable, with two little dots of light visible to the naked eye at the other end. The demonstration laptop was sending two separate HD video streams to a nearby television screen without any visible lag. The laptop includes a 12mm square chip that converts the optical light into electrical data that the computer understands."
That's just ridiculous. SSD drives demanded an upgrade to SATA 6.0 Gb/s because they were saturating the SATA 3.0 Gb/s link. Last I checked 3 is bigger than 1.
Ah, er, what's that? SATA2 runs at 3Gb/s because the paltry 1.5Gb/s of SATA1 was outpaced by fast hard drives. This isn't even counting RAID0 controllers that can effectively double that. Now, on to Gigabit ethernet. Even with optimization most find .7Gb/s is the practical limit for things like NFS or SMB. You may do better with dedicated storage systems but you're getting away from consumer-grade technology.
Summary: Is 10Gb/s too much for a modern consumer desktop? No; if you have a lot to transfer you WILL see the difference.
Yes, using a flashlight is a pretty normal way to do that.
I suggest you learn English.
I think you are misunderstanding how DRM works... All those connections were for digital information you can DRM digital information. You are thinking about DRM over HDMI that is because the previous methods sent analog information to the device.
It is difficult to DRM Analog information (heck lets even call it ARM (Analog Rights Management)). As the main information is easily decoded. Digital Information can be encrypted.
However you must also realize that Analog has a fundamental weakness is that it isn't accurate and cannot be copied exactly. Hence why all the fuss about DRM. Digital Stuff can be copied over and over millions of time and it is still as good as the original. Analog copies after 1 or 2 copies of copies you can tell the difference.
It isn't about the wire or unification of the wire, or the interface it is the software the handles the information the determines DRM
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Backup, Data processing
I used to hang my tape backup off of my file server because it had the most data to backup and so the fastest interface to the tape drive was installed on the file server.
All of the other machines (and file server)were given Gigabit Ethernet cards, and attached to a Switch that could handle 2GB simultaneous per port. The file server and mail server then were bottlenecked by the speed of the hard drives and the tapes themselves.
We also had users on the high speed network that needed to process large segments of the company's data from the fileserver which usually involved reading it into memory processing it and writing back the changes. All of these little exercises would have benefitted from a faster bus speed on the motherboard.
We could have done some stuff with striping the RAID arrays and buying more memory for the SCSI controllers, today we could be caching most of the jobs to RAM on the desktops.
My biggest bottlenecks were the hard drives all round and users competing for the 1GB pipe to the Fileserver. Having some sort of 10Gbit interface on the File Server would bring it back to drives, but as cheap as Ram is today I clearly would have bought 32GB or RAM and cached the contested data on a Ramdrive.
Create a capacity and someone will find a way to use it.
Now all we did was market research data processing, I'm sure the 3D CGI movie folks could find a use for this on their renderfarms, and I wonder if there are uses in MMOs to increase the number of folks on a battleground or zone simultanouesly.
The plan is to include a copper wire along with the optical wire for powering devices.
It is sorta mentioned here: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-346181.html
No, there are plenty of SSDs that can sustain sequential read speeds above SATA2.
16 years ago. Back then Apple was selling Quadras for $5000 and office managers were buying Windows 3.1 for Workgroups. The FDIV bug was discovered months before the Linux kernel 1.0 was released, and people still regularly used something called "Grolier's Encyclopedia" on CD-ROM to watch 320x240 15fps movies of the Apollo launch. Phil Hartman (God rest his soul) was selling Phillips CD-i players, A kid in my neighborhood had just bought a JVC X'EYE, and Conan was still writing for Simpsons.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I take it you've never actually seen a modern printing press, then, eh? You can actually get ones that take from a computer, rather than having to make plates.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
You do realize that cable television was an analog signal that required a special box to decode for years...
Actually it mostly needed the special box just to tune it - frequency shift the normally-structured 6 MHz bandwidth TV signal to a frequency where the TV would receive it.
Early "premium channels" were "encrypted" by inserting a strong but narrow-band interfering signal in an otherwise empty slot in the signal, near the sound carrier. This would intermittently "capture" the FM sound decoder and paint bars across the video, jamming the picture and sound. Subscribers had a narrow-band notch filter installed in their feeds to remove it.
(There were other systems, too, including one used on "air" channels which selectively lowered the strength of the vertical and horizontal sync signals to below the level of the video. A subcarrier in the sound provided the information necessary to identify and boost the sync signals back to normal.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
All you need is ONE analog copy, then digitize it and no further degradation.
I do this all the time, I record HD over component analog into a encoder. I encode to mpeg4 and several billion copies of that all look fantastic.
In fact, I find it hard to find someone that can tell my 720p analog copy is a analog copy.
This is why I love the analog hole, it's very useful and bypasses corporate stupidity.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sir –
Incidentally, Macrovision was the dominant analog signal encryption for quite some time. Macrovision was easier to decode - as you note, albeit difficult to decode perfectly.
The same way you manage to have more than 4 TCP connections open at once, despite your Ethernet cable only having 4 pairs of copper.
The idea of multiplexing and timeslicing on a shared medium is already used at pretty much every level of a modern computer system.
If you have a situation where the performance cost is a huge deal, you probably have a situation where more hardware in parallel is warranted.
Remember 15 years ago, when you could put 2 IDE hard drives onto the same bus? Remember how sometimes you'd put one onto the secondary IDE bus instead because that was faster? Same shit, different signalling medium.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
You have only to places of distortion: the ADC and DAC. In fully analog systems every part of the analog chain adds to the degradation of the signal. In modern information processing systems and long communications lines this is too much.
Torch is the standard British term for flashlight.
All of the above. Cheap, integrated power and they also use a coating on the sheathing so that when you bend the cable to a small radius your monitor doesn't go blank. Imagine being a tech support rep if they use standard single-mode for this application.
Or "one cable to rule them all" if you'd rather.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ah, er, what's that? SATA2 runs at 3Gb/s because the paltry 1.5Gb/s of SATA1 was outpaced by fast hard drives.
Rubbish. There isn't a SATA hard disk on the market that exceeds 1.5Gb/s, even in synthetic benchmarks, for anything except a direct-cache transfer (which is irrelevant due to its size). Though they are getting close, with 10k RPM drives and high-density 2TB drives hitting ~140MB/sec. In real-world use it's unlikely most people would notice even if bandwidth was a "paltry" 0.75Gb/s.
This isn't even counting RAID0 controllers that can effectively double that.
No, they're irrelevant because you can only put a single drive on a channel. The RAID controller has multiple channels [0].
Summary: Is 10Gb/s too much for a modern consumer desktop? No; if you have a lot to transfer you WILL see the difference.
No, you won't. Not on anything that could be referred to as "a consumer desktop" with a straight face (hint: multiple RAID arrays with double-digit spindle counts and 10Gb networks aren't "consumer" anything).
[0]Except for port multipliers, but they usually come with their own internal bottlenecks.
My physics lessons a few years back scream at me that the XXXXXXX "2channels" is not possible. Light does not reflect that precisely through the fiber.
Multiple wavelength works great though.
If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.