Apple and Light Peak Technology

By Alex Angove

Last updated 23 February 2011

The internet has been ablaze with talk of Intel’s new Light Peak technology for a while now. What is it? Who’s funding it? Why should we care?

Well without getting in to too much detail Light Peak will (remember, this is minus the detail) offer a similar service to USB, only at a current theoretical maximum of 10Gbps.

If you aren’t sure what that means then listen to this. You’re current USB connection is probably USB 2.0, which offers speeds of around 480Mbps. That means that this new Light Peak technology will offer you data transfer up to 20 times that of the average USB connection.

Why does that matter? Have you ever synced a mobile device to your computer to transfer files such as movies or music and had to wait for hours, even the entire night for it to complete? Imagine that process happening in one 20^th the time. It isn’t a life changing technology, but it’s definitely a time-saving one.

Furthermore, if you're planning to stick around until 2020, Intel expects this technology to go as fast as 100Gbps in the next decade or so. 10Gbps is amazing, multiplying that by a factor of 10 is beyond incredible.

Unfortunately for the time-being Light Peak is going to fall a bit short of its 10Gbps potential due to the limitations of hard drive read/write speed on either end of the connection. To really gain access to Light Peak's true max speeds a user would have to have at least 2 Solid State Drives (SSDs) on either end of the connection working in RAID in order to actually reach a 10Gbps rate of transfer.

Intel has also decided to go with an old-style copper wiring form, rather than the superior optical fibre cabling we were hoping to see. This means that as a signal travels further the signal degrades more quickly. However, you can still expect Light Peak to blow USB 2.0 (and even USB 3.0) out of the water come its launch, despite its somewhat old-timey copper construction and limitations imposed by current hard drive technology.

In exciting news Apple is expected to announce some-time soon that it will be incorporating Light Peak connections in to its new devices. This is great news for more than the obvious benefit to Apple consumers.

Not only will it mean that Apple fans will have access to this awesome technology, but also that this new development shouldn’t fall by the wayside due to a lack of industry support. We’ve seen it before in such services as FireWire, a fantastic data-transfer connection that just never took off due to a general incompatibility with just about every computer and device.

With Apple leading the charge you can be sure to see Android, Microsoft and even Nokia stepping up and offering the same service in an effort to compete.

Syncing your portable device is (hopefully) about to get a lot easier.