Monday, July 1, 2013

Light Peak Turns Into Thunderbolt and "Blinded Me with Science"

This article first published on Technorati.com
Have you noticed how many different ports there are on computers now? Sometimes it seems they are running out of room to put them.
For several years now, in an attempt to reduce the number of various ports on computers, (such as USB/Firewire SATA, SCSI, SATA, etc.), Intel has been working on a new proprietary cable interface to connect peripherals and devices at 10Gbit/s, potentially up to 100Gbit/s by the year 2020. During the development phase, they called this new connector "LIGHT PEAK" and have been touting it as the holy grail of all connectors. It has been released both by Intel and Apple with the new name of THUNDERBOLT.
Despite the name, at least initially, the first implementation will be using copper, not fiber optics as originally designed, but Intel says there won't be any loss of speed due to the use of copper. Sony is also an early adopter of Light Peak.
Light Peak potentially will transfer data at 10 gigabits per second, both directions, simultaneously. That is massive volumes of data, for example, a complete full length Blue-Ray movie in under 30 seconds. However, there are still no existing data protocols that can handle that kind of data transfer speed.

There have been competing speedy connections, like USB 3.0, which is half as slow as Light Peak. USB 3.0 has a peak theoretical transfer speeds up to 4.8 Gb/s, unfortunately Intel will not support USB 3.0 on the Sandy Bridge technology, which will eventually be used by all PC makers and Apple in 2011. Basically, this leaves USB 3.0 with nowhere to go.
Where does this leave the consumer? Quite confused by it all?

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