Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated-light-peak-creation-to-intel-could-be/

by mikedouglas • 17 years ago

74 26 17 years ago

engadget.com

a2tech• 17 years ago

One standard to rule them all? Make it keyed like Firewire and it sounds like a real winner.

Devilboy• 17 years ago

It looks like this is going to blow USB3 out of the water.

blasdel3• 17 years ago

Oh god no, Firewire is a particularly bad example of a keyed port.

When implemented cheaply using a split flanged socket, the plug can easily be pushed in backwards, spreading the flanges. Apple learned pretty quickly what a terrible idea that was, and switched to a design where there's a hard ABS ring inset in the aluminum exterior case. Unfortunately every other manufacturer continued with the shitty design.

On top of that, the power supply is 12v/1A, and is carried on one of the outside pins! If you shove it in backwards, power gets connected to data and fries the board. They should have used the central pins for power and ground.

I've personally seen at least a dozen cases of fried Firewire ports, including several epidemics where someone would fry ports on several computers using one bad device.

tesseract• 17 years ago

Would you say that the GameBoy connector (on which the FireWire one is based) is a better design in that respect?

jrg• 17 years ago

That just reminded me of this piece, written by Michael Johas Teener - one of the people who was heavily involved in Firewire development.

http://www.teener.com/firewire_FAQ.html#Why_the_4-pin_connec...

(No word on what he thinks of the FW800 connector.)

psadauskas• 17 years ago

If its optical, and a single "conductor", it probably doesn't matter what orientation you have the cable. Make it round, like a headphone jack.

wmf• 17 years ago

Usually optical cables have two fibers (for Tx and Rx); you can use one fiber but it's more expensive because of the splitters on each end.

just_the_tip• 17 years ago

Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.

Here's an excellent (but long) video on this topic: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462

chime• 17 years ago

Thanks for linking to the video. I'm 10mins in and loving it.

lamby2• 17 years ago

We need more guys like that. "We don't have refresh buttons in the user interface, because that would just be horrible."

blasdel3• 17 years ago

USB's simplistic interrupt-driven host-client nature makes it unbelievably awful for mass storage or streaming data.

Those same qualities make it terrific for cheap human input devices.

fuzzythinker• 17 years ago

Don't think optical can carry power though, so would need a separate power port or a hybrid port for devices.

jonknee• 17 years ago

That's a good point, but it should be possible to have a hybrid cable--carrying power and the optical data.

carl_• 17 years ago

So in 2012 can we be expecting iphone (as cpu) > 10Gbps > Keyboard Video Mouse Network?

stcredzero3• 17 years ago

I hope they can build a fiber interface into the Magsafe jack. That way, you could have a monitor that's also a docking station, just plug in one cord! Apple's almost there as it is now. An inductive charging stand would be just as cool, especially if you could devise a data standard to work with it. Just set your laptop in the stand, and it would get power, be hooked up to the external monitor and all of the peripherals.

sarvesh2• 17 years ago

Isn't it premature to call it a Standard? Apple may have pushed Intel to work on it but getting it adopted as a standard is gonna take time.

tvon• 17 years ago

You are referring to the wrong definition of "standard". The article is referring to a "technical standard", not an "industry standard".

edit: unless you just mean that the approval process for the standard will take time.

sarvesh2• 17 years ago

That's what I meant. Unless it gets approved as a standard it's not going to be widespread.

brentbb• 17 years ago

I don't see any word about licensing. I, for one, can't wait to see Monoprice start pumping out jackbox sets for this!

phr• 17 years ago

Thanks for mentioning Monoprice. Cool company.

olefoo• 17 years ago

Sometimes a change in scale is a change in nature as well; what this type of data bus means is that you can synchronize the entire state of the device with other devices on the same physical bus in fractions of a second. This opens up new opportunities of all sorts.

Given the proliferation of virtualization, even for mobile devices; it should be possible to carry around on your phone a workspace of fairly sizable dimensions and in human terms seamlessly copy the entire state of that workspace to an external host, manipulate it there (think Surface or Minority Report style interfaces, or VR, or specialist transforms that require vast amounts of computing power) and then sync the device with the updated state (and either purge or archive the copy).

No more progress bars!

Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard

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