Apple pushed Intel to develope 10Gbps "Light Peak"

[Katanai]

I'm not sure I fully "get" Light Peak. I see on Wiki that it says the speeds will start at 10Gb/s - is that actually true? If so, what will the costs be like? Current 10Gb/s infrastructure is hideously expensive... far, far out of what any consumer could possibly afford. If the speeds are lower though, then I guess I'm just not sure why we need yet another standard and another cable... one which quite likely has a lower lifetime (lasers aren't known for longevity, and I don't think LED's could get up to 10Gb/s without using a large field of them, though I could be wrong on that).

Don't get me wrong, if prices are actually low enough for this to be useful and it does start at 10Gb/s then I'm on board.


Edit: Waaaaait a second. I see they're also trying to push for LAN to be done through lightpeak? Okay, now I know they're pushing for too much. Speeds right now aren't held down by the cabling standards, they're held down by processing power at the router/switch node. We have cabling right now that can do 10Gb/s but we're on 1Gb/s because only highly expensive equipment can handle the throughput (let alone the signaling). This is a very serious chink in the "It's a 10Gb/s cable that will do it all!" theory and until I learn more about this implementation I'm a little scared of what will happen if it does get aggressively pushed out.

I'm afraid that you don't really understand what the purpose of this is. It's, put simply, more of a dock port for laptops than anything else. It's meant to connect a laptop to all external devices inclouding routers and internet connections in general. I don't see anything wrong with that...

[Serra]

I'm afraid that you don't really understand the purpose of this is. It's put simply more of a dock port for laptops than anything else. It's meant to connect a laptop to all external devices inclouding routers and internet connections in general. I don't see anything wrong in that...

I understand the purpose, what I'm concerned about is performance and appropriateness.

If it operates under 10Gb/s, then we need to know what speed it actually runs at because there are a lot of purpose-built cables out there that might handle our data faster. If it is hideously expensive, we need to know that too.

As far as what it is "meant to do" - it's meant to be able to connect anything to anything. But you can't just arbitrarily do that. You can't just arbitrarily connect to a switch then to another PC and expect to get 10Gb/s speed - the switch/router has to actually process data at the throughput speed, and I promise you that no consumer technology can do that today. Which brings us back to my question - How Fast Is It?


@steve:I'm not saying that this couldn't be good - I want to see pricing and exact speed specs. As to the copper issue - yes, we're at about the limit of Cat 6. Cat 7 is available though, it's just not popular because there is no reason to use it right now. I'm not against fiber for connecting to things around the home, but I think it's something to approach very, very cautiously. I also know about DWDM, I would be shocked if multiple wavelengths weren't in use to get the 10Gb/s out of a link they plan to sell to customers.

I also have a problem with people pushing optics for home use because:
1. It's not installed in any homes (yet) - maybe get it installed then worry about replacing ports with it
2. If you have a jack issue... man, you have to hire a pro to come fix it, and the fix is not cheap.

Edit: Steve, what are you doing out of Storage? Back to your cave! :P j/k, it's nice to see out out and about.