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."
optical structured cabling? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who would use this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
To be putting it in consumer electronics, though, you pretty much have to make the cabling and connectors quite durable and generally idiot proof. This hasn't, historically, been the first set of attributes you associate with optical fiber(it's a hell of a lot more durable than you'd expect a tiny thread of glass to be; but you have to care about turn radius, and dust and stuff getting on the connectors, and whatnot). Either Intel is just handwaving, or they actually think that they've got a set of mechanical designs that'll let fiber be as robust as USB, and still work despite accumulations of pocket lint, and people rolling over cables with chairs, and stuff getting bent in laptop bags, and whatnot.
Re:Who would use this? (Score:3, Interesting)
I did wonder about its usefulness myself, though. Why would I need to connect my iPhone to five different things at once? I rareky even need to connect my laptop to more than one or two things at a time.
Then I gave it some more thought and it occurred to me: at some point in the not-too-distant future smartphones will have the capabilities of today's laptops in terms of computing power and storage. You're unlikely to use that much power on the go, and you're hampered by the small screen and keyboard. But, for at least a segment of the population, you'll be able to dock your supersmartphone much like you can dock a laptop today. The dock will connect to a larger monitor, perhaps a keyboard and mouse (though those may be wireless direct to the phone), network, optical drive, offline storage, printer, and other peripherals. Your smartphone would be the computing guts of a much broader and capable system.
But the docking connectors on dock-able laptops are enormous compared to the size of a smartphone. Having a single, small, optically-based connector that can connect your phone to all those other devices will be key to this paradigm.
That is, of course, unless wireless technologies completely supplant wired connections for peripherals.
Some speculation on a fairly content-light article (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the title was not very helpful - it came from the first of the linked articles. The second was a bit more informative but still quite vague.
The interesting thing here seems to be that they're planning to tunnel multiple protocols over the optical link. So you might be hanging monitors, USB devices, SATA drives, whatever off this link. It'd be a bridge that could tunnel your device connections to somewhere quite physically distant, using only a single cable. One assumes (maybe this is a big assumption) that an important part of the effort is in getting hardware that can efficiently do the encapsulation / decapsulation of the various device protocols. I'm not entirely sure why you couldn't do this over a 10Gb ethernet link, with some kind of protocol for tunneling over ethernet. I'd speculate that it'd make the controller chips more expensive if you did this but I really don't know. Everything is guesswork anyhow, until they give us more information.
The main thing I can see this being useful for is stuff like blade desktops - the real computer you're using as your desktop is just a blade server in a chilled room, with sysadmins leaving it regular sacrificial offerings for optimal uptime. The monitor, USB devices, everything would then be connected to the blade desktop by a single optical cable. Only one slim cable to route for each desktop, everything runs over it so the "desktop" can still have functional USB ports etc. Having an optical cable seems like it would be ideal for that kind of scenario. The ultimate thin client. If you have multiple Light Peak ports on a single blade then perhaps you could get multiple virtual machines to drive separate workstations, making your datacentre density even higher.
Other stuff it might be interesting for is some kind of cheap (?) high speed networking, home media servers, low cost SAN hardware, etc. Depending on how they do it of course. But if they made it generic enough it would be really interesting for a lot of applications that are now priced out of the reach of individuals and probably also small businesses.
Just an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably wouldn't be great for long distances, but I could imagine something like that having some advantages for replacing USB and ethernet w/PoE (at least in a home or office setting).
Re:optical structured cabling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cat-5 is certainly the best option today; but I'm guessing that grandparent is hoping for something that wouldn't raise the costs of endpoint devices significantly.
I'll assume you're using CAT5 in a generic way to mean CAT5/CAT5e/CAT6... We don't run CAT5 anymore - it's all 5e or 6. I'm not even certain where we'd buy a spool of CAT5 anymore, seems like our vendors only sell CAT5e and CAT6 these days. And CAT6 isn't much more expensive anymore.
But using CAT6 for the wiring isn't necessarily going to impact the cost of the endpoint devices at all. I can terminate that CAT6 with a couple RJ11 jacks and stick any old telephone on it. I don't need a fancy VOIP phone or anything like that.
You can run pretty much anything you want over ethernet, as long as you can get it in under 1Gb/s; but only if you are willing to put a full general purpose computer(or a dedicated embedded device, if the market has seen fit to provide one for your application) at each end. This is less than wholly useful when it comes to older devices, or cheaper devices that are still only shipping with some sort of non-ethernet connections.
Nobody said Ethernet [wikipedia.org], they said CAT(5|5e|6). That's just copper. You can run ethernet over it... But you can do lots of other things with it as well. There's really no need to use ethernet over CAT6 - that's typically what you do, but it's still just copper. You can send analog signals just as easily as digital.
If, say, you want to connect a projector and a DVD player, that is normally cheap and easy. A few analog video cables, supported by even the most awful players and projectors, or DVI/HDMI in the expensive seats. If you wanted to do that over ethernet, you'd need a comparatively high end projector, and a DVD player that supports ethernet connected projectors. I'm not sure any of the latter exist, so you'd have to use a full computer for the purpose. Doable; but hardly optimal.
Or you just get a CAT6 video extender. [lmgtfy.com] Takes your video from VGA or HDMI or DVI or whatever, passes it over your CAT6 to the other end, and pipes it back to VGA or HDMI or DVI or whatever. Great devices. We installed several of them in a dental office so we could mount televisions on a moving arm for the patients.
I'm not sure exactly how grandparent's desire would actually be made to work in a real world setting; but ethernet isn't quite it. It would arguably be a suitable basis for what he wants; but it wouldn't be the whole picture.
Again, we're not talking about ethernet, we're talking about CAT6. There's a difference between the network protocol and the wire it is transmitted over.
All the new construction we work in has bundles of CAT6 going everywhere. You don't see any special wiring for phones or anything like that... It's just all CAT6, terminated accordingly and patched into either the data or voice systems as appropriate. You'll still frequently see some coax cable running around for television... But that can easily be run to absolutely every room and terminated in a central location, then patched in as necessary like you would anything else. Or you could just throw everything across your CAT6 with an adapter or two thrown in.
Really, these days, you don't need all sorts of different cables and connectors and jacks. Run AC to the room, a bundle of CAT6 lines, and maybe a coax line - done! You can now connect pretty much anything to pretty much anything, anywhere in your house.
This isn't something theoretical... We're doing it now.
Re:Who would use this? (Score:1, Interesting)
There were serial connections before USB, but USB was still groundbreaking technology. Intel is working on optical connections for consumer devices. That means it's going to be cheap, simple and robust or it's going to fail. Doesn't sound like needing expensive splicing hardware and using fragile glas fibers to me. POF (Plastic Optical Fiber) kits are already on the market in the form of Ethernet transceivers, but they don't go beyond 100Mbps and are mostly niche products. If Intel has created a system where the transceiver components are small and cheap enough to put them into portable devices, while pushing the data rate up significantly, then this has USB killer written all over it.