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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."
It's nice they've developed a way to transfer data at ridiculous speeds, but it does the average user no good as long as we're using mechanical hard drives. Even a "mere" 1 gigabit network connection outstrips the ability of spinning platters to absorb it. I guess this Light Peak thing is aimed at the server market then?
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 second little dot was a floating-point error.
As opposed to... mechanical light?
There's my new patented method for data transfer. Measuring the impact of photons on a force transducer.
Seems like this could be an effective plug for the analogue hole.
Cautious optimism should be shown. Sounds like something that could come back to haunt users.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Why did they have to stick it in the horribly designed USB connector?
The engineers responsible for that connector must have never made it past sophomore design class. You either make a part that is obviously asymmetric (d-sub, ieee1394, 8p8c) or one that is truly symmetric (RCA, TRS connectors). Instead, we're stuck with this symmetric-appearing but actually asymmetric USB connector that I try to plug in backwards half the time.
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.
Syphilis.
Something to remember as you look at this, the LightPeak connection isn't just a connector onto itself, it's also designed to handle all other connector types (eSATA, USB, Firewire, DVI, etc). It's designed to be the one port you plug into your laptop while at the other end a dozen different devices are connected to it, all using different protocols.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
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
I'd assume they'd call it a "torch" since the reason they use the word "torch" for what we call a "flashlight" is because it's a torch, just one powered by electricity instead of fire. Much like an electric oven in just an oven powered by electricity instead of fire.
A better question is "why did Americans decide it should be called a 'flashlight' instead of an 'electric torch'"?
Because 1) It emits light, and 2) it flashes! Er, wait a minute... how about because it was the device of choice for use by nocturnal flashers, unlike torches, lanterns, and candles which had the unfortunate side effect of causing serious burns to precisely that area of the anatomy that the flasher most wanted to illuminate?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Why a new proprietary optical transport when there are already standards-based transports that do the job just fine?
Or is this just a cheap, short-range, optical ethernet transceiver with a new connector, cabling system, and optics-integrated interface chip?
Two fibers would be consistent with using integrated LEDs for transmitters rather than separate lasers and/or using two frequencies to go bi-directional on one fiber. For short range you don't need coherent light or single-mode fiber.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's compressed size. Uncompressed HD video is gigabits per second, and most displays take in uncompressed video.
From http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/flashlight.htm
Note that in most other languages, it's called a varation of "lamp" or "lantern".
Do TOSLINK (SPDIF) cables fail regularly? Are they prohibitively expensive?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.