The Intel Developer Forum in Beijing on Wednesday drew to a close, but the proceedings revealed that Intel still intends to bring the fiber optic cable format known as Light Peak to market.
Light Peak is a high-speed optical cable technology designed to carry HD video, audio and data on a single cable. Initially supporting transfer rates of 10Gbps, or twice the speed of the new USB 3.0 standard, Intel envisions the technology as the lone successor to SCSI, SATA, E-SATA, HDMI, FireWire and USB.
A basic Light Peak system uses a controller chip and optical module that work in concert to convert data from electrical impulses to light and back. Intel has previously expressed that the technology could feasibly scale to 100Gbps over the next ten years.
The main advantage of Light Peak, Intel says, is the nature of fiber optics. By changing the wavelength of the light for each type of data being transmitted, a single cable is capable of carrying multiple protocols. For example, this would allow a Blu-ray player equipped with Light Peak to transmit video, audio and Ethernet without separate HDMI and Ethernet cables. Another scenario might be transferring data to an external hard disk while pulling video from your HD camcorder uninterrupted.
While most fear a protracted standards war between that of USB and Light Peak, the battle may be over more quickly than one might imagine: the USB 3.0 connector specification already permits for optical connections, and Intel’s demonstrations of Light Peak have used a USB connector. Equipping motherboards and devices with Light Peak and USB 3.0 could be as easy as baking both into a single-chip controller, a solution that Intel has inferred that it is already working with partners to achieve. In the future, enabling Light Peak’s transfer rates on supporting devices could be as easy as plugging in the proper cable.
For now, Intel says, there is still much work to be done for the new standard, but consumer devices are expected to hit the streets in limited volume as early as 2011.