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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 aimed at reducing the number of different cables on your desktop, I believe.
The initial demo showed an LCD panel, HDD, and at least one other thing running off a single Light Peak chain. Effectively, they want it to replace USB (for data connections), Firewire, eSATA, SATA, SCSI, SAS, DVI, DisplayPort, probably every audio connection you have, Ethernet, and likely more.
Someone will develop something that will take advantage of that ridiculous speed, and then someone will develop something that can take advantage of data being transfered at ludicrous speed. Then one day, in the future, computers will go to plaid.
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.