You have probably heard about fibre optics for years — some kind of exotic technology used to carry gargantuan quantities of data across continents. But in the not-too-distant future, you might be plugging these tiny glass strands straight into your computer.
At September's IDF, Intel demonstrated fibre-optic technology called Light Peak for connecting many devices to PCs with fibre-optic lines.
Intel secured major Light Peak endorsement from Sony and now it has begun trying to make it into an industry standard.
But bringing optical technology to the masses will require more than Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner taking the stage to connect a thin white Light Peak cable into the back of a prototype PC. According to sources familiar with the situation, the most likely mechanism to carry Light Peak out of the R&D lab to the edge of your laptop will be the venerable Universal Serial Bus, and Intel has begun pounding the pavement to try to make that happen.
"Now all the pieces are in place," Rattner said. "We need to get a standard established to turn on the entire ecosystem to Light Peak."
Even technophobes are familiar with USB. The plug-and-play technology started its journey in PCs and has spread to handsets, consumer electronics devices, digital cameras and more. And new developments from the group behind the standard, the USB Implementers Forum, could expand adoption more, with a new faster, more power-efficient version and with technology to make it better for charging devices plugged into a computer or power outlet.
The new 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0 has 5Gbps data-transfer rate, more than 10 times that of the USB 2.0 version that prevails today, and the first USB 3.0 device achieved certification last week. A separate new USB feature increases the amount of power that USB devices can use from 0.5 amps to 0.9 amps, while adding another 1.5 amps specifically for charging batteries, making USB for tasks besides just transferring data.
The 5Gbps speed is a big step up; NEC's demonstration of its newly certified USB 3.0 controller showed 500MB of data transferred in 4.4 seconds with USB 3.0 compared to 39 seconds with USB 2.0. But for USB to really break out — to accommodate the data-transfer needs of a large 3D TV screen, for example, or to synchronise a terabyte-capacity iPod in moments — there is still more work to be done. And this is where fibre optics come in.
"At some point the industry is going to have to transition," Jeff Ravencraft, the USB-IF's president and chairman, said in an interview, because copper wires such as those in the current USB 2 and new USB 3 standards have limits on how fast they can transmit signals. "I think the next transition is going to be to optics."
Intel's aspirations and allies
Intel's hope for Light Peak is to create a single connection for video, storage devices, the network, printers, webcams, and anything else that plugs into a PC. Light Peak uses circuitry that can juggle multiple communication protocols at the same time, and the Light Peak promise is for a universal connector to replace today's incompatible sockets for USB, FireWire, DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI. It is a hot-plug technology, meaning that devices can be linked when they are up and running.
Intel has pre-production chips and said the technology will be ready to ship in 2010. In its current form, Light Peak can transfer data at 10Gbps each direction along the fibre-optic line, but Intel said Light Peak will reach much higher speeds — 100Gbps in the next decade, according to Jason Ziller, director of Intel's optical input-output program office.
The Sony endorsement is important, because the company sells PCs, music players, cameras, video cameras and Blu-ray players. But another company at least as significant had a quieter Light Peak appearance at the Intel show: Apple.
Intel's second demonstration of Light Peak, in which a single cable transported high-definition video and data to a storage system at the same time, used a Mac OS X computer.
Apple would be a strong ally: it has influential designs with an emphasis on uncluttered appearance and ease of use, it is willing to take a stand for technology it believes is superior, and its iPhones and iPods that take ever longer to synchronise with a PC as storage capacity expands.
And on Saturday, Engadget reported that Apple is not merely a Light Peak ally, but that it brought the Light Peak idea to Intel and has plans to bring it to Macs next year. Apple and Intel declined to comment on the matter.
But do we really need to go all the way to optical now? High-speed electrical communications is hard — wires can cause electromagnetic interference, for example, and USB 3 cables can only...
