Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard

by mikedouglas on 9/27/2009, 12:12 AM with 26 comments
  • by just_the_tip on 9/27/2009, 1:59 AM

    Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.

    Here's an excellent (but long) video on this topic: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462

  • by olefoo on 9/27/2009, 6:30 AM

    Sometimes a change in scale is a change in nature as well; what this type of data bus means is that you can synchronize the entire state of the device with other devices on the same physical bus in fractions of a second. This opens up new opportunities of all sorts.

    Given the proliferation of virtualization, even for mobile devices; it should be possible to carry around on your phone a workspace of fairly sizable dimensions and in human terms seamlessly copy the entire state of that workspace to an external host, manipulate it there (think Surface or Minority Report style interfaces, or VR, or specialist transforms that require vast amounts of computing power) and then sync the device with the updated state (and either purge or archive the copy).

    No more progress bars!

  • by fuzzythinker on 9/27/2009, 2:14 AM

    Don't think optical can carry power though, so would need a separate power port or a hybrid port for devices.

  • by a2tech on 9/27/2009, 1:34 AM

    One standard to rule them all? Make it keyed like Firewire and it sounds like a real winner.

  • by carl_ on 9/27/2009, 2:42 AM

    So in 2012 can we be expecting iphone (as cpu) > 10Gbps > Keyboard Video Mouse Network?

  • by brentbb on 9/27/2009, 5:06 AM

    I don't see any word about licensing. I, for one, can't wait to see Monoprice start pumping out jackbox sets for this!

  • by sarvesh on 9/27/2009, 2:57 AM

    Isn't it premature to call it a Standard? Apple may have pushed Intel to work on it but getting it adopted as a standard is gonna take time.