Intel has demonstrated their Light Peak system in IDF 2010, which will be a great bus system to handle super heavy traffic with huge chunk of data. The Light Peak system will be able to handle 10 gigabits/s, though it’s possible to scale to 100 gigabits/s in the near future. Intel demonstrated two setups illustrating Light Peak’s potential at IDF.

First up was a Compaq notebook connected to an Avid HD I/O box, which was in turn connected to two more devices, which is an external Western Digital dual-drive solution with a Light Peak connector, and an HDMI adapter driving 1080P video content.According to Intel, Light Peak enabled Avid to move mixing control to the Compaq notebook software suite. Bandwidth is now sufficient to pass uncompressed extremely high sampling rate audio streams between the notebook and the Avid HD I/O box.

All of those white cables coming out of the Avid box on the left side are Light Peak. Light Peak connects the Avid HD I/O box and its lossless audio streams, a raw 1080P HDMI video stream, Western Digital external hard drive, and another uncompressed video played back on the Dell LCD to the left in this demo. This demo is clearly targeted at selling studio artists on Light Peak. The Light Peak to HDMI converter box has also shrunk considerably. It’s now a bit smaller in profile than a credit card.

There’s no external power adapter here either, just Light Peak to HDMI for the TV. The Compaq notebook has been shown around a bit before, but the connection is again seamlessly integrated into the notebook by all appearances.

The second demo involved a desktop PC with Light Peak connecting to a modified LaCie 4big Quadra, connected to yet another big display with a built in HDMI adapter. At the far left on the TV was the total bitrate of the storage system, which showed a solid 768.8 megabytes/s of throughput. That’s about 6.15 gigabits per second of throughput. It’s obvious that the video is uncompressed in order to achieve such high bitrate, but the display itself was only 1080P.

Both demos show how close Intel is to finalizing Light Peak for consumer consumption, and how closely they’ve been working with partners like Western Digital and Avid on Light Peak enabled hardware. Of kush, USB will still live on for donkey years. USB 3.0 might have just begun to lift off its home and flood the market soon enough, it’s still great to know that the big players are hard at work to build such concept, of using a single connection and cable for everything. We’ve seen people building concept of using USB 3.0 and Ethernet for nearly everything, so how well should this turn out, and is rather exciting to watch.

Note from Anandtech:

Light Peak isn’t a protocol, but instead simply provides a new physical layer for existing connector protocols. Traffic like DVI-D, HDMI, USB, and audio can all coexist across Light Peak.

Intel didn’t use WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) to achieve 10Gbps, and maintains that although WDM could be used in the future to increase bandwidth, there are other ways to scale to 100Gbps. As of current, Light Peak is 100 meters capable, though the actual product will be limited to 50 meters of distance. Cables have sufficiently small bend radius that they can be wrapped in a knot or around a pencil without the connection losing connectivity, and up to 7 devices can be daisy chained.

Interestingly, Intel is using an 850nm wavelength laser for the system, besides the multimode fiber. Data is bidirectional across the interface (duplex). 850 nm is a rather interesting choice, as it’s still subject to class 1 eye safety limits (just above -4 dBm), but more so because it was the wavelength used in some of the world’s very first long haul fiber optic networks.

Intel’s silicon photonics remain a separate project from Light Peak, as Light Peak uses VCSEL laser diodes. The long term vision is to eventually bring the two together in a much broader scope to bridge datacentres together instead of just desktops.

SOURCE via Anandtech