Intel Connects PCs To Devices Using Light 179
CWmike writes "Intel is working on a new optical interconnect that could possibly link mobile devices to displays and storage up to 100 meters away. The optical interconnect technology, Light Peak, could communicate data between systems and devices associated with PCs at speeds of up to 10Gbits/sec., said David Perlmutter, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility group. The technology uses light to speed up data transmission between mobile devices and connected devices like storage, networking and audio devices, the company said. The technology could help transfer a full-length Blu-ray movie in less than 30 seconds, says a post on Intel's site. Light Peak can run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling mobile devices to perform tasks over multiple connected devices at the same time. 'Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible,' according to the Intel entry. It could also lead to thinner and fewer connectors on mobile devices, Perlmutter said."
Re:Who would use this? (Score:3, Informative)
So do I. It's called a "Blu-ray disc".
Anyway, when did "full-length Blu-ray movie" become a unit of data? What happed to the traditonal "Library of Congress" measure?
Re:Who would use this? (Score:5, Informative)
2) You probably don't have a 10Gb/s cable
3) You certainly don't have a 100m long 10Gb/s cable.
Re:Who would use this? (Score:5, Informative)
Source: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm [intel.com] - interesting facts
Re:Ummm.... (Score:3, Informative)
you haven't touched fiber for a decade have you. The new stuff can get bent to nearly an inch radius without even starting to suffer losses. Hell we have some jumpers her that were demoed to us that you can bend at a tight 110 degree angle with a ..5 inch radius and it still does not break, but does suffer from 2db loss at that point.
The bitch of fiber is that it's a PITA to install ends. I gave up and simply cut pre-made jumpers and fusion splice them onto the incoming. faster, cheaper, and far more reliable.
Re:Who would use this? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who would use this? - Nobody (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if you do your cabling right, yes you can. Ethernet's got distance limitations- fiber has less of one. Power can be ran the same distances if you pair it up around the fiber and make it part of a special connector... Moreover, the crowd they're tailoring this to doesn't care as much about power concerns over the interconnect. They want reliability, ease of cabling, distance, and overall speed- and they're not wanting to dangle all sorts of things like people do with USB stuff.
Re:optical structured cabling? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, he's probably even doing the Voice on the net... I would. VoIP phones to a PBX switch in the wiring closet where the stuff all comes together at.
There's little need for special wireups, etc. these days. Done right, you can just drop a handful of Cat-5 drops into a room along with the mains plugs and light switches and have everything imaginable in this day and age handled in some fashion.
You could just as easily do the connect with fiber (and perhaps better with it if the cables still weren't a bit more fragile than one would like them to be...) because it's all TCP/IP based at that point and the media's less relevant as long as you can either translate it to another format or have devices on that network type.
Re:Who would use this? (Score:2, Informative)
...unless, of course, you take into account that S/PDIF is a protocol (like TCP, IP och Ethernet) that has nothing to do with the medium on which it's transmitted. You could have two monkeys yanking a rope (which does seem to be the case for the main internet-bearing lines accross the Atlantic from time to time) transmitting TCP/IP-packets between eachother.
Re:optical structured cabling? (Score:4, Informative)
Say I want to watch the satellite TV feed in the bedroom, and get my IR remote working up there as well so I can change the channels. My SkyHD sat TV box doesn't the ability to connect to a network - should I buy a PC and put it into the living room with a video capture card (good luck with doing this with HDMI high def content) and an IR blaster, and have it stream the result over ethernet to another PC in the bedroom with a monitor attached to it? No, what I want is a long virtual HDMI cable and a long, virtual coax cable for the remote signal.
Re:Just an idea (Score:1, Informative)
While TFA is not well written, the new Intel connector does exactly what you just said. They want to be able to send signaling and power to devices over the oprtical link (for some devices that have modest enough power requirements). Think of it as power over ethernet combined with an optical waveguide for the data. As a bonus: noise on the copper will never affect the data.
Re:Cost... (Score:3, Informative)
Today, 1000baseT is included on $500 laptops, and you can get a 5 port 1000baseT switch for $25. If you think similar things won't happen with 10G, you're wrong.
No. with 10GBASE-T over COPPER it's not a question of COST, it's a question of POWER.
10GBASE-T uses too much power, all because it takes more power to get a higher bandwidth signal over the same 100m of copper as Gigabit. Current estimates are about 6W for a controller [wikipedia.org], which is way too high for integration into chipsets. And you can only reduce the power required for the DSP logic on the controller - the amount of power it has to deliver to the line to meet 10GBASE-T signaling standards is a fixed quantity. Since the power numbers I quoted are for second-generation devices, you can bet your ass that the DSP power quotient has been reduced to almost nothing, so that 6w is almost entirely signaling power.
Hell, even low-power Gigabit controllers use over a watt - this is why a lot of low-power devices still ship with just Fast Ethernet. The industry is moving toward EEE (Energy Efficient Ethernet) [embeddedsystemnews.com] to combat this, but it's really nothing more than an idle mode - peak power is unchanged.
Optical offers very low power consumption at 10G (less than 1w), but will require the adoption of a new connector standard regardless of what standard the market goes with. Intel sees the opportunity here: if people will have to buy a new infrastructure to use low-power 10G, they will buy whatever is cheapest, not whatever is used in the server room.