Intel's Light Peak May See the Light This Week

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. may formally introduce the first commercial implementation of the already well-known Light Peak interface as early as this Thursday. Moreover, Apple can be the first implementer of the technology with its new breed of Macbook Pro notebooks.

On Thursday the world's largest chipmaker, according to a media report, will host at least two briefings dedicated to the Light Peak interconnection technology that "about to appear on the market" Apple is also projected to formally unveil its new Macbook Pro notebooks later this week, also on Thursday.

The new Apple Macbook Pro notebooks are projected to be based on Intel Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" processors, feature a new graphics technology, a hybrid storage sub-system featuring both flash and traditional hard drive, as well as one or more Light Peak connectors in order to enable rapid transfer of data from external devices into the new laptops.

The rumours that Intel wanted to bring LightPeak to market as soon as possible have been around for many quarters. Recently Intel officially confirmed that in order to release Light Peak commercially in 2011 it needed to use copper wires instead of fiber optics to make the technology more affordable, but sacrifice a significant portion of performance and versatility of the technology.

The first version of Light Peak was supposed to have 10Gb/s bandwidth over distances up to 100 meters, two times higher than the maximum bandwidth of USB 3.0 (which maximum distance is 1.5 - 2 meters). With fiber optics cable it should be possible to increase the bandwidth of LightPeak to up to 100Gb/s eventually, according to earlier claims. But with copper wires, the speed and range of data transmission may not be as great, according Intel. Earlier rumours claims that it should be possible to transfer data at up to 10Gb/s over copper wires.

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