LightPeak is a technology being built by Intel that allows data to be transmitted at speeds up to 10GB/s over fibre optic connections.
A demo was recently run that showed a laptop sending a couple of HD streams over a LightPeak connection to a nearby HDTV. On the laptop side a USB adapter cable was used that paired the optical connections to a regular cable due to the lack of optical LightPeak ports on HDTVs.
By using a small 12mm square chip the device can convert electrical signals in to light pulses with current speeds reaching around 10GB/s although Intel intend to dramatically improve this over the coming years. 10GB/s refers to the simultaneous bi-directional transmission rate which is quite impressive.
The good news here though is that Intel are planning on getting production units out by the end of the year. Right now it is unclear if the new transmission protocol will take over something such as USB that is already quite embedded in to products. Intel do believe it could replace a number of standards though including USB, HDMI and DisplayPort. The technology could hit the living room in products such as TV, computers and other products that need to transfer vast amounts of data quickly. Other applications also include datacentres and server farms where a lot of data is constantly being transferred.
Via: DeviceMag
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