Intel's Thunderbolt With Fiber Optics Years Away 69
CWmike writes "Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect technology could be years away from getting optical technology, an Intel executive said this week at IDF. Originally introduced in February on Macs, Thunderbolt was pitched as being optical technology but currently uses copper wires. Dadi Perlmutter of Intel's Architecture Group said copper wires are working much better than expected, and that fiber was expensive. 'It's going to be way out,' Perlmutter said. 'At the end of the day it's all about how much speed people need versus how much they would be willing to pay.'"
Just give us the tech (Score:1)
.. we will be the judge of whether we need the speed or not.
Re:Just give us the tech (Score:4, Insightful)
Except it doesn't work like that. Let's say Intel know that it will cost them 10 million dollars to create the optical version of the tech. They know that the optical version will (ignoring dev costs, just on parts) cost, say, three times as much as the copper, but only offer a 15% improvement in performance. They can make a reasonable guess that while a small subset of people will happily pay three times as much for a 15% performance gain, they aren't going to be able to make their 10 million back. If they can't make back their dev costs, they aren't going to dev. They'll wait till the economics make more sense.
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from what i've seen in how they are doing copper cables vs using fiber.. this is nothing that new - it reminds me almost exactly of using SFP's/Mini-GBIC which for networking and the san world allow for both copper and fiber connections - and while not always cheap, that is mainly an attribute to the market they belong (enterprise class equipment).
i might be wrong but while i'm sure developing the underlying protocol and controller isn't cheap - it should have a simple interface to the cable. the controlle
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That was pretty much my point.
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This I wouldn't disagree with; and Intel does do some of this. For whatever reason they don't think this particular product is worth it. I pulled the 15% number out of my ass of course, but if they aren't expecting the optical interface to be a huge improvement over the copper, maybe they just aren't bothering for such small gains.
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The issue is per unit costs, not startup. I also think there is also the profit angle.
Right now, if adding optical cost $5 in parts, that's $45 at retail... There's no clear use, so the "race to the bottom" starts befoe the tech is highly profitable. There is also the matter of handing Fiber Optic cables to the general public... It's just too fragile and users would rebel.
Also, 10Gb fiber cards are like $500 each right now... Why would intel kill that market?
I need the optical tech (Score:1)
I need the optical connection now so that my optical mouse can fully function. Without it, its way too slow!
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You need a coherent fibre bundle, not just any old fiber, but that's roughly how endoscopes work.
Re:I need the optical tech (Score:4, Funny)
What I want to know is, can I get an optical Thunderbolt cable from Monster with gold connectors? I had to throw away all my optical audio cables because those shitty plastic connectors just didn't have a warm enough sound.
Actually, I think I have an SPDIF adapter with a gold plated end. It's for connecting a Toslink cable to one of those 3.5 mm audio sockets that also include an optical link. It's not completely gold plated though, which probably explains the lack of roundness in zeros, and the missing edge in ones.
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The zeros are still backward with that adapter. Now, if you got the Denon cable that also includes directional arrows, they'd come out the end in the proper orientation.
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"Sup dawg, we made your optical mouse connection an optical connection so that your optical... will optical..."
Meh, it was worth a shot.
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That's a pretty ridiculous accusation to level at intel.
Sure, Moore's law is one part prediction and one part self fulfilling prophecy, but the progress in computer performance (per watt, per dollar, etc.) over the last 40 years has been pretty nice.
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Right, because the one thing a technology company can expect is zero competitors attempting to eat their lunch.
Like FireWire... (Score:4, Interesting)
FireWire was also supposed to 'go optical' at some point, but market forces kept it copper.
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ISTR the original roadmap showing 1.6Gbps on copper by now, and 3.2Gbps "some time in the future" on fiber (with copper next to it for power.)
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If the MPAA folks hadn't pushed for DRM on HDMI, we'd have nice Firewire connected AV equipment and everything'd be cool. Can't wait until I find a gateway to the universe where that happened. Although I imagine there's a bunch of slider versions of myself all hanging out in my living room over there.
Fiber is expensive? (Score:2, Insightful)
I read that as "we don't own all the patents on the interconnect hardware, and to produce it would cost us more than using our in-house patent base and patent-free copper connections. Surprisingly, it turns out we're somewhat incompetent at modeling electrical connections and the results don't match our simulations but they're better than we planned, so we'll patent what we have and plan on taking that to the bank."
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SPDIF has been around for years, and it isn't terribly expensive. I can get a 6 ft. cable for $2.99.
It's so "expensive" that's it's built into the headphone and line in jacks on my Mac, and most people don't even realize it's there.
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Yeah, I've got an Asus laptop that's like ... 7 years old, and it has a hybrid copper-optical SPDIF port on it. Wasn't even a particularly expensive laptop at the time.
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Afaict it's not the fiber itself that is expensive It's the laser diodes, photodiodes, precision connections to the fiber, protection against fractured fibers from kinked cables and so on that make a high speed fiber system expensive. Especially if it has to be made "idiot-proof".
TOSLINK (optical version of S/PDIF) is indeed cheap but that is because the low speeds let them get away with REALLY low grade optical components (including polymer fiber that is less prone to damage than glass fiber.
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It's the end connections I presumed were expensive, and an area where their patent portfolio was thin. I can agree somewhat on the cable front, and I want thinking about TOSLINK when I thought of cheap cables, but I'd never really considered what the bandwidth was.
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I agree. Mod up. I don't know what the truth is, but I think Intel's explanation is BS.
SPDIF has been around for years, and it isn't terribly expensive. I can get a 6 ft. cable for $2.99.
It's so "expensive" that's it's built into the headphone and line in jacks on my Mac, and most people don't even realize it's there.
Optical SPDIF aka TOSlink operates at a few megabits per second (~5 max) using cheapass red LEDs (not even lasers! And truly generic off-the-shelf, any random 650nm red LED can switch on and off at a few MHz), the lowest grade plastic optical fiber, cheap plastic connectors with extremely poor alignment (important in the optical world), and so forth.
You can't get away with that kind of low-grade hardware if you hope to send and receive 10 gigabits per second (as in Thunderbolt). That requires high performa
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Given Thunderbolt copper cables rely on active cables (the cables actually have circuitry in
meh... (Score:1)
I've never been a fan of optical cables, they have really poor flexibility for typical use in a desk/office environment. Considering how capable copper thunderbolt is, seems unnecessary.
Surprise, surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
Conveniently, there exists just such a 10Gb optical interface: 10GigE. Even better, the optical portion is frequently broken out into a separate module(to allow for multiple different grades of tranceiver, depending on distance and fiber requirements), making it possible to price the optics package separately from the switch to which it attaches.
10GB/s optical XFP or SFP+ modules are, indeed, not all that cheap. Much cheaper than they were; but (at least the Intel ones that some rough retail-pricing showed) still easily as costly as some of the smaller planned "thunderbolt" peripherals...
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Yeah, going to optical when copper will do doesn't make economic sense. There's no need for the bigger bandwidth of optical as long as the transceivers are fixed and non-upgradeable, as they would be in consumer equipment. Even in the high-end space, there seems to be lots of 10GigE over copper these days.
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In various niches, there is a demand, backed up by actual money, for all kinds of typically copper interfaces over optical, VGA, PS/2, USB, serial, etc. However, because the markets are so small, you can't really buy any devices with optical interfaces for that, you just make do with proprietary adapters with a co
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Local optical interconnect has NEVER made sense (Score:1)
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well there is one very really advantage to optics over wires.. and that is that there is an unlimited potential bandwidth - single mode fiber > any electrical conductor (excluding supper conductors)
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Before making fun of someone else's spelling check your own, chucklehead.
You been trolled son.
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Oops, you misspelled knucklehead.
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Like an Onion article (Score:1)
TFA reads like an Onion [theonion.com] article:
"Copper will continue to improve, which happens. There have been many technologies that had been predicted dead 20 years ago that are still making good progress. We'll see," Perlmutter said.
Aren't optical signals processed via devices connected with copper wires at the end of the day?
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Yes. The main benefit of optics is that you don't have the same sort of signal loss as a result of resistance. The longer the distance the more important a consideration that becomes.
Short-run cabling probably isn't going to see much difference between the two transport mechanisms. Copper still has a lot of headroom.
That processing that's done at each end is done by very efficient short-run copper. Until they start making optical traces and transistors in IC-size, that's going to be a limitation which is no
Missed the point (Score:1)
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This.
Cable length is an issue for certain things, amongst them USB. I am currently at the spec limit for cable lengths. Since USB timing can get hairy when you exceed the limit on cabling, I have to make accommodations for that limit (chaining hubs is not something I will consider just to exceed it). I would like an external interconnect where this is not an issue. 15 feet is not a whole lot in many situations.
Powered extenders are expensive, because they have to integrate timing corrections to compensate f
I thought this was expected (Score:2)
About a year ago, when I was reading about LightPeak(Thunderbolt), Intel claimed it was going to be 10-40gbit and was going to take a few years *after* 22nm became standard.
Just based on Intel claiming LightPeak was meant to come out after 22nm, means it was released early. I am not surprised that the optical version is still some odd years off.
Personally, I think this early release was a mix of Apple and Intel. Apple wanting the fastest and unique, and Intel wanting to make at least some money on their tec
Because of them sticking with copper It will loose (Score:1)
No remote TVs :-( (Score:2)
Now that graphics cards are powerful enough to drive 3 or more full HD displays all that's missing is a way to connect them across the home. LightPeak looked like a perfect fit: across one cable you could connect a display, a USB infra-red remote, and even USB drives or an SD reader. And with the fiber optic cable there was no range issue. You could just go through the attic and to the other side of the house, tens of meters away if you so wanted.
But then all we got is Thunderbolt with a measly 3m maximum l
External GPU (Score:2)
What about the Sony Vaio Z? (Score:1)
What about the Sony Vaio Z docking station Power Media Dock? It was advertised June 28 to be using ”an optical cable” and ‘Light Peak’.
http://presscentre.sony.eu/content/detail.aspx?ReleaseID=6836&NewsAreaId=2 [presscentre.sony.eu]
It is available now, at $499.99,
http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&partNumber=VGPPRZ20A/B#features [sony.com]