Remember a few years ago when IBM aired
commercials for its blade servers? The commercials' tagline was Out With Cables. The theme: Use blade servers,
get rid of all those nasty, tangled cables in your data center. Cable: that dreaded, necessary evil.
Now it's Intel's turn. Last week at the Intel Developers Forum the company announced its
Light Peak technology. Intel's not claiming that Light Peak will eliminate all cables--just those pesky ones that are subject to electromagnetic interference.
Light Peak is a high-speed (read: 10-Gbit/sec) optical cable, which Intel promises will be available next year, meant to connect devices including consumer-electronic equipment as well as disk drives, printers, and other networked devices.
Light Peak's web page goes into detail explaining the benefits of optical-fiber transmission. The
video takes viewers inside Intel's optical lab.
A far cry from IBM's clever swipe at cabling, Intel's Light Peak looks like a promising technology of the near future.
Labels:
fiber optics
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Intel
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10-Gbit data transmission
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: Light Peak: 10-Gbit connectivity at your fingertips
