Light Peak

							            Light Peak
At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray
          movie in less than 30 seconds

               George South

  Jan 2011- Consumer Electronics Show
     2011 - Intel may deliver a copper
     version of Light Peak at 10 Gbps
      before the photonics version !!
1. Introduction to Light Peak
 Light Peak is an optical cable interface
  designed to connect peripheral devices
 The technology has a high bandwidth at 10
  Gbit/s, with the potential to scale to 100 Gbit/s
  by 2020.
 Light Peak is being developed as a single
  universal replacement for current buses such as
  SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and
  HDMI, in an attempt to reduce the proliferation of
  ports on contemporary computers
2. Bandwidth demands
• USB was developed for the same purpose, and
  successfully replaced a number of older
  technologies
• However, increasing bandwidth demands have
  led to higher performance standards like eSATA
  and DisplayPort
• Light Peak provides a high enough bandwidth to
  drive these over a single type of interface, and
  often on a single daisy chained cable
3. Protocol Agnostic
• Light Peak also has the ability to run
  multiple protocols simultaneously over a
  single cable, enabling the technology to
  connect devices such as peripherals,
  displays, disk drives, docking stations, and
  more
Intel Quote
• The multi-protocol capability the controller
  implements is an innovative new
  technology that will enable new usage
  models like flexible system designs and
  thinner form factors, media creation and
  connectivity, faster media transfer and
  cable simplification. As end users rely
  more on their PCs and CE devices as they
  go mobile, they want smaller and thinner
  form factors.
3. Intel developments
• Intel has designed a prototype PCI Express card
  for desktop PCs as an add-on
• This would mean many people wouldn't need to
  buy a new motherboard for the new cable type.
• The card has two optical buses powering 4
  ports. On many machines, however, such a card
  would not be able achieve the full 40Gbit/s
  bandwidth of four Light Peak ports, as that
  bitrate would require a 16× PCIe slot (1× PCIe is
  4Gbit/s) for optimal performance, and most
  machines only have one 16× slot, usually
  occupied by a video card
Interface Technologies
•   LVDS Display Interface 2.8 Gbit/s
•   HDMI v1.0 4.95 Gbit/s
•   DisplayPort v1.0 (4-lane reduced rate) 6.48 Gbit/s
•   Dual link DVI 8.03 Gbit/s
•   HDMI v1.3 10.2 Gbit/s
•   DisplayPort v1.0 (4-lane full rate) 10.8 Gbit/s
•   DisplayPort v1.2 (4-lane) 21.6 Gbit/s
4-Fibre Interface