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."
Cheap Fiber? (Score:2)
Is this just cheap components for Fiber? 100 meters is pretty far, I am guessing that this could have networking uses beyond ripping media to external drives.
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Is this just cheap components for Fiber? 100 meters is pretty far, I am guessing that this could have networking uses beyond ripping media to external drives.
100m is a good distance... More than I'd probably need for connecting a mobile device to anything else in my house... But it isn't amazing. Doesn't good ol' ethernet cap out around 100m?
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Yes, it is the same distance but at 10X or 100X the speed of current Ethernet. If this stuff is really at consumer level pricing then imagine how cheap it would be for a business to insert this stuff in a data center or workplace. I guess there could be latency issues or something but I still don't see why this couldn't be used to move large amounts of data around a data center or office LAN.
optical structured cabling? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not structured cabling... (Score:2)
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What I've wanted for some time is a universal standard of structured cabling: I'd run a "bus" cable round the house ...
You're either a visionary, a fan of Jules Verne, worked in government some years ago, or you watched Terry Gilliam's Brazil on TV recently.
Either way, sign me up for your newsletter. ;-)
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I think this is it, this new cable tech. would be the be all end all of all cabling, for this much bandwidth through put, yo could put all your devices on it, your phone, pc, media center, etc...etc...
Now we just need the matching protocol that would allow to run simultaneous messages on the same cable.
1394 - Apple did that right. USB did drivers right (Score:2)
1394/Firewire is wonderful; the only downside is that it lacks the wonderful driver classifications (and support) that USB has.
As far as I am concerned, if Apple designed the basics again as they did with firewire and intel adds the driver support that USB has it'll be a win-win situation.
PLUGS:
I just hope that Apple designs the plugs because USB plugs always have been stupid!
Not that firewire is a whole lot better-- but I for one hate this A/B plug insanity that we must deal with. I only want 2 kinds of p
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You probably don't want a bus cable... I remember troubleshooting some old bus networks... Pain in the ass. Entire network would freak out because somebody had unplugged something.
You can already do most of what you describe with CAT5e/CAT6. CAT6 obviously makes a great network cable... But you can easily use it to carry telephone as well (even if it isn't VOIP). Lots of the new construction we're working in just has bundles of CAT6 going everywhere. Run 3 or 4 lines of CAT6 to a wall and you're unli
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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 che
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cat5 is not the best option today.
Cat5e or Cat6 is the best option. In fact Cat6 is as cheap as cat5e nowdays.
Honestly you do not need more than a 1000Bt network in a home. 100Bt is good enough for even streaming HD video to multiple players.
640k is enough for anybody (Score:2)
perhaps your 5 digit uid has blinded you
1000Bt is enough TODAY
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.
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Cat6 is not currently capable of handling CATV from decent cable providers. Many of them are using every frequency up to 1GHz, and cat6 is not designed for that. Besides that, the dB loss on cat6 is huge compared to some decent RG6 coax. Those video adapters are decent for running a single video stream, but they can't support things like QAM 256 modulation or even a high-def uncompressed stream.
For the time being, I usually recommend a minimum of two cat6 lines and one RG6 coax line ran everywhere you might
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So that if I want to add a several of low bandwidth device later, say 10 speaker system, even if I don't have 10 pairs of copper cable, I can multiplex them in one CAT6. Given that their bandwidth consumption are way lower than 1Gbps.
I guess HomePlug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug_Powerline_Alliance) or related
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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
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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.
sky has e-net just not on. You may get direct tv s (Score:2)
sky HD+ does has e-net just not on yet. You may get direct tv stuff like pc play back, vod, mvr, soon.
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.
Transceiver likely molded into cable (Score:3, Insightful)
dust and stuff getting on the connectors, and whatnot .. and still work despite accumulations of pocket lint
Although this isn't mentioned specifically in the video, it appears as if the transceiver is meant to be permanently attached to the fiber. This would be the easiest solution to the lint issue, plus it would eliminate the complexity of making good optical connections. Essentially, I think they intend to have the transceivers molded into both ends of the fiber and it would probably look just like an USB cable to the average user, only with fiber running end-to-end, rather than copper. Of course, I'm not sure
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If Intel has 10Gb 100meter transceivers cheap enough to mold onto the ends of fiber cables that consumers are going to break every six months, they'll have a real hit on
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Optical cable is fucking easy to do.
You do not need high quality glass fibers to do consumer fiber runs. Plastic fiber will work just as well, and has a much better turn radius.
Glass fibers have no place in the home until they're literally fool proof. If I can't spool a cable around my arm or step on/trip over it without destroying it, I don't want it.
Trying to work out why this is news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can anyone enlighten me as to which part of this story is meant to be news?
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Watching the short video the only two things that seem to be new are:
* the optocouplers got much smaller
* they also got a lot cheaper to manufacture
Basically means, that these things could be embedded in usb sized connectors and sold for an affordable price. What they did not explain is how they want to circumvent user habit of cable folding. Optical cables tend to be quite sensitive to this.
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Crappy journalism. That's like advertising iSCSI as Ethernet.
Fiber data transfer is nothing new, but Intel designed a chipset for what could be some kind of "FireWire over fiber", designed for generic PC to peripheral interconnection.
Existing standard fiber connections are dedicated (only one signal/protocol in the fiber) while this one can multiplex (or time-share ?) many signals of different protocols.
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You have ran a hi-res display, audio, an external drive, and networking over a single connection, with no mucking about to set it all up?
Cables or not? (Score:2)
Hang on, are there cables or are there not? If this is wire-less (something like IR) and reliable then that sounds like quite a big achievement, if not then it just sounds like fibre optics with a bit of a twist. I can't tell from the description or the article whether this new "Light Peak" is a system over wires (at which point why trumpet the mobile applications?) or some big jump in wireless peripheral connection.
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.
What's new here? (Score:2)
The article is scarce on information. I agree with all the others who've said that this seems like they re-invented fiber. I'm guessing since they mentioned mobile devices that this is really a low-power, low-cost fiber transmitter that they're talking about. Current electro-optical transceivers at 10gbps are pretty large in form factor and suck up a lot of power (~300mW) which would be inappropriate for mobile devices.
We have this Ethernet-thing... (Score:2)
We have had IEEE 802.3ae for six years now. What's the benefit over your run-of-the-mill 10 Gbps Ethernet?
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).
That's no Blu-Ray disc (Score:2)
How long is a Blu-Ray disc (Score:3, Funny)
I wondered how long a "full length Blu-Ray movie" is? Is it, like, just under 100 metres so it fits in the cable? Or is it 3 km, so that you have to drag that 100m cable for 30 seconds at 1 m/s to transfer it?
All these new units of measurement get me really confused.
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goodbye USB DVI HDMI CAT SATA !?! (Score:2)
The only thing close to a technological limitation that I can imagine would have to be the modem silicon
What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
OMG! You can use light to transmit data over a cable? That's freaking crazy!! Wow.
What's next? Some way to switch circuits without using tubes or relays? Yeah -- like that would ever happen.
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The story is about Intel bring this to devices for your PC.
I like it, it will be easier for me because I would prefer all my components be external and neat place around my desk.
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External components? Really? Not like there's a market for external hard drives, CD/DVD players/burners, digital cameras, scanners, printers, phone interfaces, music players, and all the other things that we only wish we could connect to our computers from the outside rather than having them built in. First, there would really need to be some way of connecting them to your computer. And hopefully it would be some sort of standard.
Perhaps, one day, that dream will be realized.
More bandwidth, slower round trip (Score:2)
Blu-ray movie in 30 seconds? (Score:2)
Nooooo! (Score:2)
Its the PCjr keyboard incident all over again... the nightmares!!! The sore arms trying to align it...
Seriously tho, why not just enhance bluetooth instead? Its here, its now..
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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)
Source: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm [intel.com] - interesting facts
Re:Who would use this? (Score:4, Informative)
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Intel, try googling before you run: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=10+terabytes+%2F+10000000000+bps [lmgtfy.com]
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The FDIV bug lives on?
Yep... (Score:2)
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Cost... (Score:2)
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.
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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 t
Here's a clue, luser... (Score:2)
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Re:Here's a clue, luser...
Oh boy! You know a post is going to have some mind-bending insight when it starts with a clumsy personal attack!
10G supports optical PHY.
Yes, but so does every other competing standard. The only thing keeping Ethernet alive is the backward-compatibility of the RJ-45 connector. But the power consumption of the connector means it will never leave the data center. This means that Ethernet has lost all traces of "backward compatibility," which means it will lose tons of steam in th
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The only thing keeping Ethernet alive is the backward-compatibility of the RJ-45 connector.
and here I was thinking its the API
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That is what was said abot ethernet. Now it's so ubiquitous that my blue ray player has an ethernet port. Why intel isn't just pushing to lower the cost of ethernet which is already well understood. With the advent if Isata and I scsi do we really need a different layer 2 protocol?
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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:4, Insightful)
Yes I do, and Yes I do.
I have a bundle of at least 16 100Gb/s cables that run over 2Km. the only thing not letting my fiber optic cable run 160Gb/sec is the transceivers at each end are too low of quality to do so. so we live with 2 paltry 100Bt fibers a couple are used for video, and the rest are dark for future use.
This cable was laid 5 years ago way before Intel decided to discover fiber optics.
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Intel has been involved in fibre for fibre's entire history.
They have done optical RnD for a very long time.
I can't imagine why you have 2Km of fibre in your house.
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because unlike most slashdotters. I go outside and have a job. I have 2KM of fiber connecting two locations that I am in charge of.
and they have NOT been there from the beginning. Corning was. and a Corning rep demoed this new "fancy" tech 4 years ago at CEDIA.
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I have a bundle of at least 16 100Gb/s cables that run over 2Km. the only thing not letting my fiber optic cable run 160Gb/sec is the transceivers at each end are too low of quality to do so. so we live with 2 paltry 100Bt fibers a couple are used for video, and the rest are dark for future use.
FTFA These are cable inside your computer.
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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 st
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The library of Congress contains over 10 terabytes of information (a 1 with 13 zeroes after it). If you used Light Peak technology operating at 10 billion bits per second it would take you only 17 minutes to transfer the complete library of Congress.
If you can transfer 1 LoC in 17 minutes, then you can transfer 0.000108243216 LoCs per second.
Since the Blu-Ray movies can be transferred in less than 30 seconds, the size of the Blu-Ray movie is anywhere from 0.000108243216 LoCs, or (30 * 0.0001082432
Re:Who would use this? (Score:5, Funny)
1 LOC is 2000 BRM.
The speed is 50 libraries of congress per microfortnight.
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Benchmarks dude, I would like to know what you are running to take a 25gb dvd into your pc using ANY cable (usb, firewire...) I would like to see that happen in 30 seconds...pls show me the proof.
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You can backup your dvd unto your pc in 5 seconds with dvd tray.
I have never heard of that, are you understanding what I am asking?
Backing up an actually dvd (all its info) from the disc to your hdd, so that after
you can actually watch the dvd on your pc's drive WITHOUT having the dvd in the dvdvrom.
I have never heard of such a benchmark.
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That's exactly why I said what I said, this does not exist yet...the combo of technology to allow for this to happen at 5 seconds as the person claims to be able to do, is impossible right now,
maybe in the near future....
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Heh... I would say someone using a supercomputer cluster in an RF-hostile environment for now. I'm not wholly sure where Light Peak's supposed to take things outside of that, though. They're working on 40Gbit and 100Gbit interconnect for clusters, etc. right now and 10Gbit is in ATCA blade server cages right now as the fabric interconnect. Perhaps there's higher signalling rates more readily possible than with copper on this- or perhaps there's less of a distance problem with it like there is with 10G
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Is it just that they've given it a new name, as that's all that I can get out of the article.
So the non-article-reading crowd wins again. I gathered this much from the summary.
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.
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Data centers would really benefit from this.
Replacing Huge bundles of cable that needs to be electrically shielded with ODN (Optical Data Network) cabling.
Re:Who would use this? (Score:4, Insightful)
You could call it "S/PDIF"...
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Wish i had mod points...this is exactly what i thought.
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...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.
Ok, then IrDA... (Score:2)
Infrared *is* light, you know...
Technically, any wireless link uses photons (of too low wavelength to be considered light though :) ).
Paul B.
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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....
I have a semi-serious question: Suppose you set up two robots to be 'monkeys' pulling on a rope stretching across the Atlantic, what would the ping time be? Would the other end of the rope start moving faster/slower than a signal going over a cable?
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-wave [wikipedia.org]
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what if the rope was completely non-elastic, weightless, and standed completely near the oceans surface (meaning the rope was following the earth's curvature), and the ocean and wind were completely calm around the length of the rope?
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Why the heck would you want a cable to be named Sony/Philips Digital Interface? Shouldn't that be IDIFC in that case?
obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Do not stare into cable with remaining eye.
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"Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible," according to the Intel entry.
Survey says...... *bzzzzzzt*
Fiber optic cable is much more fragile than almost all other cables. You can't bend it much before the fiber inside breaks. Now if they've invented some new type of optical cable that is more flexible, I'd say that's more interesting than whatever data protocol they've made. But I doubt it.
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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 rel
Re:Connectors (Score:2)
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Yes yes, but the difference is that you respect the fiber. Indeed I don't use fiber that much, but I have used it in the past 5 years for SAN connections and the WAN guys use it of course for switches and routers. But they certainly would be careful (and so would you) before subjecting it to the kind of abuse that people usually give ethernet, USB, VGA and power cables. People do all kinds of things like kink, pinch, stretch and slap other cables. I'm 100% sure that in the past 10 years, they haven't ma
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I think many of us at some time would rather connect a specific device in the dark; especially if the other device lacks a certain aesthetic appeal.
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At 10 Gb/s? (Score:2)
Yes, infrared is, in a way, the same thing, but the main difference, is speed. IrDA has been around for, what, a decade or longer? But, it's not 10 Gb/s.
Designing for the future? (Score:2)
Engineers can't design for the present, lest their products be obsolete-on-arrival. It's not unreasonable to think that storage and bus speeds will get faster, as will the speed of hard drives (SSDs are already increasing disk storage performance, though, granted, not many people have those, *yet*). If we are using optical externally to increase data transfer, there's no reason to think this tech won't be applied *internally* to allow the Mobo to send data to your SSD (or whatever other storage device tech
Overclock your Wii (Score:2)
And if you overclock your Wii using the new "LightPeak TM" technology, you can finally have "real" light sabers for wii users to play/fight with!