Intel Corporation’s Light Peak technology is an new optical communication capability that will be a universal connector for almost all commodity IT. It is designed in about the same form factor as a USB cable, and it will be replacing everything that USB cables are used for today. But its incredibly high data rates means it will also link monitors, TVs and entire networks together.
The marketplace gets to decide if this is really going to take off, but all indications are that it will. Look for it to replace USB, FireWire, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet and any other cable you can think of, to any device.
Demos have been given of Light Peak, and some companies are already building components, so we are going to see offerings with Light Peak this year.
Here are two aspects to consider about Light Peak:
1) With chip and PC architectures continuing to improve, the Light Peak capability will soon allow 10 Gig optical connections directly into your processor. Lots of goodness can run over optical data but lots of badness/malicious code can as well. I’m hoping the security technology marketplace keeps up with the optical comms to processor marketplace. Look for cloud-based security providers and offerings like those at Verizon Business to increase in importance in the marketplace.
2) We should consider what this capability will do for media dissemination. If you can download an entire movie in a matter of seconds would you download more movies? Consider that question in the context of the 1.5B computers connected to the Internet. That will be a lot of media whoosing around the net. And that media will need to be stored. So what will Light Peak do for licensing models and the storage market?
For a bit more on Light Peak see the embedded video below.
