Intel Light Peak Can Transfer Blu-ray in 30 Secs

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
My god there are some STUPID posts today!

First of all to pakardbell (not even going to say it) Mb's are 8 to 1 MB. 10Gb/s is 1280MB/s. Throw together a few enterprise class RAID arrays (fiber channel of course:) ) and you can saturate that.

Second to all of you that seem surprised that fiber is used in anything; all Cable systems are HCF (Hybrid Coax Fiber) at this point, damn near every good audio device has an optical SPDIF (around 650nm wavelength) for DATA transmission (what do you think digital audio is?), and pretty much all backbone's for telecoms are fiber (or microwave).

Now for the expensive bits, the wavelength has something to do with the total possible bandwidth, but for the most part, proper optical cable (not SPDIF) 10Gb isn't exactly breaking a sweat. The receiving/transmitting electronics are very expensive. Just go price out some Cisco 10G SFP's for example. Unless Intel can produce very cheap electronics for this, their idea hasn't a chance of getting off the ground. Considering 1Gb electronics cost a couple hundred bucks a port, 10Gb isn't even worth mentioning. Do CWDM or DWDM and it would possibly be cheaper as you can get multiple 1Gb or even 10Gb wavelength electronics sending over a single fiber pair. Still not cheap though.

To dman3k, if you really want to blow your mind, you can do send/receive over a single fiber, how bout them apples?

To prodigit80, fragile? You can literally lift a car with a good quality single mode fiber (assuming you could find a way to attach it.) It's reinforced with kevlar and depending on its application, the surrounding cable components can be damn near indestructible. If you have optical cable that breaks from bending it, stop buying Monster! But their gold plated optic cables work so well! :) Seriously, good cable can be tied in a knot and pulled on as hard as two grown men can, untangle it and it works like new. I've seen it and done it myself; still links up and transfers at 1Gb. Just don't scratch the fiber at the ferrule unless you like polishing glass. Only ultra high speeds will be affected by the micro/macro bends you could possibly impose on a properly built fiber. And the plastic "optics" most audio fibers are made from? Even more resilient. The $5 amazon ones are great in fact.

And to anyone that thinks high end fiber costs a lot? A 3 meter single mode (much more expensive than multi mode) costs less than $25. Still more expensive than copper, but it's getting a LOT closer without that silly 100m cable limit. And almost nothing any home user would need to do would require single mode, unless you want to run fiber between your house and your moms house 25 miles away!

jkflipflop98 just awesome!

Sailfish, not exactly how it works unless you want to mux/demux every device, but then it gets kinda ugly.

To ertg43tgdf, the fiber has nothing to play in its potential capacity, only the electronics and the wavelength in use.

Maybe this is why fiber optics hasn't caught on in the consumer world; consumers are dumb to the facts and possibilities of fiber...
 
[citation][nom]Shadow703793[/nom]Kind of late with the news Toms.[/citation]

Did someone force you to read news on this site? Are you a member of some secret "Complainers Club" with the rest of the douche bags that post that same comment everyday?
 
Now if Intel would make optical processors where the data is processed optically! They really should try to make that.
Reasons: faster in clock cycles, less power needed, gives consumers a reason to buy.
Optical processors could really offer huge advantages.
Optical graphic processors could process thousand times more information than todays, elektronics based ones.
 
I think fiber and light we'll be the future. Multiple colors of lights, so maybe not just binary on one signal. But 10Gb is not really a big deal to talk about right now, since USB 3 is already going to be 5. Cool to think about, but this particular idea for fiber really isn't very exciting.
 
Awaken688, CWDM and DWDM use different wavelengths (colors, that you can't see) to get multpile signals on a single fiber. We're talking around 1.8Tb on 180 wavelengths on a single pair of fiber. This is in the 1550nm band with spacing of 25GHz. At 12.5 GHz spacing in the L band, 1565.48-1624.88nm, you can fit 560 channels, that's 5.6Tb/s!!!

The lasers and equipment required for this are crazy expensive, I think you can only get around 40 channels per transmitter/receiver pair, so it has to mux/demux a bunch together to get that maximum for DWDM.

Those are well out of the territory I deal in. I only deal with Aurora and Harmonix CWDM gear at 1270nm to 1610, 15 wavelengths. Though we are doing to get into DWDM it seems.

A transceiver for one wavelength, not including supporting equipment is around $500, a complete two sided solution without mux/demux is around $3500 not including the fiber. That supports only 1Gb as well. Very expensive.

Copper electronics are still far cheaper.
 
Intel is probably talking about CWDM here. DWDM is far too expensive for anything other than high end backbones, and single mode is not even as good as copper for short haul networks. I wonder if the costs of the electronics can be sufficiently reduced by a large enough market for it. if the reliability problems can be solved then there might be something here
 
[citation][nom]frozenlead[/nom]The question is...If I'm not allowed to back up my Blu-Ray media by copying it to any other media...how did Intel test this?[/citation]

um.. take your own writeable blue ray disc.. write to it.. then back it up?
 
[citation][nom]michaelahess[/nom]My god there are some STUPID posts today!First of all to pakardbell (not even going to say it) Mb's are 8 to 1 MB. 10Gb/s is 1280MB/s. Throw together a few enterprise class RAID arrays (fiber channel of course ) and you can saturate that.Second to all of you that seem surprised that fiber is used in anything; all Cable systems are HCF (Hybrid Coax Fiber) at this point, damn near every good audio device has an optical SPDIF (around 650nm wavelength) for DATA transmission (what do you think digital audio is?), and pretty much all backbone's for telecoms are fiber (or microwave).Now for the expensive bits, the wavelength has something to do with the total possible bandwidth, but for the most part, proper optical cable (not SPDIF) 10Gb isn't exactly breaking a sweat. The receiving/transmitting electronics are very expensive. Just go price out some Cisco 10G SFP's for example. Unless Intel can produce very cheap electronics for this, their idea hasn't a chance of getting off the ground. Considering 1Gb electronics cost a couple hundred bucks a port, 10Gb isn't even worth mentioning. Do CWDM or DWDM and it would possibly be cheaper as you can get multiple 1Gb or even 10Gb wavelength electronics sending over a single fiber pair. Still not cheap though.To dman3k, if you really want to blow your mind, you can do send/receive over a single fiber, how bout them apples?To prodigit80, fragile? You can literally lift a car with a good quality single mode fiber (assuming you could find a way to attach it.) It's reinforced with kevlar and depending on its application, the surrounding cable components can be damn near indestructible. If you have optical cable that breaks from bending it, stop buying Monster! But their gold plated optic cables work so well! Seriously, good cable can be tied in a knot and pulled on as hard as two grown men can, untangle it and it works like new. I've seen it and done it myself; still links up and transfers at 1Gb. Just don't scratch the fiber at the ferrule unless you like polishing glass. Only ultra high speeds will be affected by the micro/macro bends you could possibly impose on a properly built fiber. And the plastic "optics" most audio fibers are made from? Even more resilient. The $5 amazon ones are great in fact.And to anyone that thinks high end fiber costs a lot? A 3 meter single mode (much more expensive than multi mode) costs less than $25. Still more expensive than copper, but it's getting a LOT closer without that silly 100m cable limit. And almost nothing any home user would need to do would require single mode, unless you want to run fiber between your house and your moms house 25 miles away!jkflipflop98 just awesome!Sailfish, not exactly how it works unless you want to mux/demux every device, but then it gets kinda ugly.To ertg43tgdf, the fiber has nothing to play in its potential capacity, only the electronics and the wavelength in use.Maybe this is why fiber optics hasn't caught on in the consumer world; consumers are dumb to the facts and possibilities of fiber...[/citation]


I was just giving a ball park number. I went by an estimate. My bad it was indeed 1280MB/s not 1050MB/s.
 
[citation][nom]gamerjames[/nom]Useless if you are with TimeWarner[/citation]

THAT'S INTERNET STUPID.

THIS IS LIKE USB UNDERSTAND my wise and beautiful friend?
 
actually it would be 1250MB/s....but why get bogged down with details. This is all well and good,but "capable" doesn't mean "actual". USB 3 is rated at 4.8Gb/s (600Mb/s)and with overhead it's expected to deliver possibly 3.2GB/s (400Mb/s) Which is still faster than any SSD's can deliver so i don't see much use any time in the near future for home use. As for monitor connections, it would be very handy for ATI cards given they're the only GPU around that can actually benifit from the high bandwidth requirerments of extreme resolutions.

Fiber optic cable may not be expensive, but the hardware required to decrypt the data stream is. Those optical audio cables going to S/PDIF inputs have a whopping bandwidth max of 0.384MB/s.
 
One thing Tom's has missed out is that Light Peak was actually thought up by Apple. Steve Jobs was talking to Paul Otellini at Apple about it several years ago and the demo machine used by Intel is a prototype Mac Pro motherboard. It's currently expected to make its way into Apple products by late 2010.
 
The news article makes it sounds like a fiber optic usb interface. Sounds expensive and not very useful for the consumer market since the other standards haven't really been maxed out. Seems like hard drive speeds are the main bottle neck to worry about.
 
[citation][nom]mlopinto2k1[/nom]The speed of dark. *Sigh*[/citation]
Yeah, we all know dark is way faster than light! Think of it, it may only take a second to travel 186,000 miles, but dark was ALREADY THERE when light arrived! Now THAT's fast! 😉
 
[citation][nom]frozenlead[/nom]The question is...If I'm not allowed to back up my Blu-Ray media by copying it to any other media...how did Intel test this?[/citation]

It's not like we're restricted to watching store-bought blu-rays or anything, nothing stops you from converting your own movies for use on a blu-ray disc.
 
[citation][nom]Grims[/nom]Interesting...where do we go now after reaching the speed of light?[/citation]

Different wavelengths of light can mean different bit combinations. For instance if they use 32bit color they can get 32 bits down a single wire per cycle.
 
I think the biggest use that Intel might get out of this is for internal connections such as Hard Drives and optical disk drives. SATA is hitting 6Gb/s but imagine if you could hit 10 or even 100Gb/s in a RAID 0.

That would surely eliminate a huge bottleneck that Hard Drives present, even SSDs. It can also be utilized like HDMI but replace it for the next step of HD (1440P) with full Dolby Digital 7.1 surround sound+.

Also for USB cables it will allow for better sustained speeds in transfer rates. Copper cables tend to lose the speed faster than Fiber does. Its like comparing FiOS to Cable internet. FiOS at the same speed will sustain a higher transfer rate and connection than Cable will.

Fiber is also able to last longer. Copper corrodes with elements and even air (oxygen) can oxygenate copper which will in the end lower bandwidth and transfer rates.

I think there will be a point as well where CPUs will actually use Fiber. Intel already announced that they were able to embed fiber lines into silicon at 22nm i think which will alow us to enter the age of light speed computing.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom