The Story
Inside the modern computer, there are enough different kinds of wires and connectors to make one’s head spin. In addition to having to hook up everything to a power supply, we’ve got USB ports and cables, SATA connectors, and jumpers for video cards. That’s not to mention devices to get online.
Light Peak is a new technology from Intel aimed at eliminating pretty much everything inside the computer save the power supply cables. All the various infrastructures for data transfer would be no more. Instead, if this tech makes it, all data will be transferred over optical cables. Right now, the speed is around 100 Gb/s, which is more than enough to to meet any data demand. So far, both Sony and Apple are backing Light Peak.
Apple’s Little Scheme
According to a whole mess of information amassed by the folks at Engadget, however, Light Peak is an idea which came not from Intel, but from Apple. Essentially, Apple went to Intel and said they wanted a high-speed, one-size-fits-all data transfer solution, and that it should all work via fiber-optic cables.
Apple apparently plans to unveil Light Peak as a standard in its annual update to the Macbook line in Autumn of 2010. This is important because not only does it indicate that Apple might phase out other ports such as miniDVI and its favorite child, Firewire, but that the company might be playing Light Peak instead of USB 3.0. There’s some talk that Apple might forgo USB 3.0 altogether, though that would be pretty stupid. Maybe if Light Peak gets big enough in ten years or so, but until then, that’d make for a ton of Macs that are incompatible with the majority of hardware on the market.
