Light Peak

http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm

Wow, Intel demoed a wired protocol called Light Peak recently and it's blistering fast. Its fast enough to transfer and entire blu-ray movie is 30 seconds.

Not sure if it will make it to mainstream PC's because it seems that Apple is behind the curtain pulling the strings. Intel expects to have it in Apple computers sometime in 2010.

USB 2.0 has an average transfer rate of about 350 megabits
Firewire 800 has an average transfer speed of 750 megabits
Light Peak has a demonstrated transfer speed of 10 gigabits, and theoretical capabilities of 100 gigbits. :shock:

Whoa. Seriously interested in more info on this!

Holy crap... this is really awesome! Would certainly be a shame if it only appeared in Apples, could really be a selling point for someone like me that prefers to build systems...

Wow.... That's pretty fast.

Interesting, but not that useful at the moment simply because that information can't be written to a hard drive that quick.

And you're very unlikely to have the RAM needed to store a blu-ray disc in memory...

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Originally Posted by Photolysis

Interesting, but not that useful at the moment simply because that information can't be written to a hard drive that quick.

And you're very unlikely to have the RAM needed to store a blu-ray disc in memory...

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Most things like that don't write to disk anyway, they buffer writing until later. If I recall, Blu Ray discs are only 4GB, most Macs have 4-8GB right now and by 2010 it'll probably be 8-16, plenty of room to store a blu-ray disc. :)

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Most things like that don't write to disk anyway, they buffer writing until later. If I recall, Blu Ray discs are only 4GB, most Macs have 4-8GB right now and by 2010 it'll probably be 8-16, plenty of room to store a blu-ray disc.

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Nope, a regular old DVD is 4GB, about 8GB for a dual-layer one. Blu-ray is 25GB per layer. You can get 24GB of RAM in some PCs (e.g. Alienware) but there's no real need for it at the moment, unless you have very specialist requirements.

Still, it'll be interesting to see how the tech works out, and at some point I'm sure we'll see devices that can store things quickly enough to make good use of it.

If they do come out with this, PC will make something identical to it in a short time. So PC dwellers shouldnt worry.

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Originally Posted by C911

If they do come out with this, PC will make something identical to it in a short time. So PC dwellers shouldnt worry.

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They won't make something identical, the hardware manufactures will simply adopt the technology. Really, it wouldn't be profitable to include such technology in consumer macs, unless it was also available for PCs, cause no consumer level equipment would have support of it.

Don't be so sure, I don't think any PCs support FireWire 800, even though it's twice as fast as USB 2. Looks like Apple did all of the specs, and Intel made it for them, so I'm not sure who would have the patent.

The thing with Firewire, is for most things "consumer", it's a solution looking for a problem

Firewire is a complex interface, designed to minimise the overheads incurred by the host CPU, as all the low level stuff is handled on-chip by the firewire interfaces at either end

USB is a simple interface
all communications (including timing and collision stuff) is handled by the host CPU

Now, this means firewire is technically "better", but it also makes it more expensive

If you only have a few external devices (general consumer stuff - hard disks, optical drives, etc.)
you won't notice any difference with the protocol overheads
(now, 200 hard disks is different, but hardly consumer stuff)

Speeds are a non-issue
USB & Firewire are in a perpetual leap-frog, so either one can the "fastest" depending

USB 3 has a bandwidth of 4.8 Gbps, which is 6 times faster than Firewire-800 (and 3 times faster than Firewire-1600, and 1.5 times faster than Firewire-3200. But the higher speed firewire protocols are not common at the consumer level)

To be honest, for 90% of the market, firewire offers nothing over USB