Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard | Hacker News Reader

Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard

engadget.com

74 pointsmikedouglas26 comments

Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.

Here's an excellent (but long) video on this topic: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462

Thanks for linking to the video. I'm 10mins in and loving it.

We need more guys like that. "We don't have refresh buttons in the user interface, because that would just be horrible."

Natural Gas traders love interfaces like that. My former boss did a release once, where you could do all of these incredibly impressive, perfectly orthogonal mass-changes to disparate object types. But what the users were really crazy about was the "Refresh" button he put in as a request.

Am I understanding the story correctly - did the refresh button actually do anything?

It did what you expected. But here's the kicker -- the system already had realtime refresh over JMS!

USB's simplistic interrupt-driven host-client nature makes it unbelievably awful for mass storage or streaming data.

Those same qualities make it terrific for cheap human input devices.

Sometimes a change in scale is a change in nature as well; what this type of data bus means is that you can synchronize the entire state of the device with other devices on the same physical bus in fractions of a second. This opens up new opportunities of all sorts.

Given the proliferation of virtualization, even for mobile devices; it should be possible to carry around on your phone a workspace of fairly sizable dimensions and in human terms seamlessly copy the entire state of that workspace to an external host, manipulate it there (think Surface or Minority Report style interfaces, or VR, or specialist transforms that require vast amounts of computing power) and then sync the device with the updated state (and either purge or archive the copy).

No more progress bars!

Don't think optical can carry power though, so would need a separate power port or a hybrid port for devices.

That's a good point, but it should be possible to have a hybrid cable--carrying power and the optical data.

One standard to rule them all? Make it keyed like Firewire and it sounds like a real winner.

It looks like this is going to blow USB3 out of the water.

Oh god no, Firewire is a particularly bad example of a keyed port.

When implemented cheaply using a split flanged socket, the plug can easily be pushed in backwards, spreading the flanges. Apple learned pretty quickly what a terrible idea that was, and switched to a design where there's a hard ABS ring inset in the aluminum exterior case. Unfortunately every other manufacturer continued with the shitty design.

On top of that, the power supply is 12v/1A, and is carried on one of the outside pins! If you shove it in backwards, power gets connected to data and fries the board. They should have used the central pins for power and ground.

I've personally seen at least a dozen cases of fried Firewire ports, including several epidemics where someone would fry ports on several computers using one bad device.

Would you say that the GameBoy connector (on which the FireWire one is based) is a better design in that respect?

The gameboy connector is rhomboid along the long edge and with a longer bevel, making it much harder to insert incorrectly.

It's usage is also a very special case -- the variance is in the cables, not the sockets. Only Nintendo had any reason to manufacture devices, and they always implemented it correctly with fascia preventing forced insertion.

That just reminded me of this piece, written by Michael Johas Teener - one of the people who was heavily involved in Firewire development.

http://www.teener.com/firewire_FAQ.html#Why_the_4-pin_connec...

(No word on what he thinks of the FW800 connector.)

If its optical, and a single "conductor", it probably doesn't matter what orientation you have the cable. Make it round, like a headphone jack.

Usually optical cables have two fibers (for Tx and Rx); you can use one fiber but it's more expensive because of the splitters on each end.

So in 2012 can we be expecting iphone (as cpu) > 10Gbps > Keyboard Video Mouse Network?

I hope they can build a fiber interface into the Magsafe jack. That way, you could have a monitor that's also a docking station, just plug in one cord! Apple's almost there as it is now. An inductive charging stand would be just as cool, especially if you could devise a data standard to work with it. Just set your laptop in the stand, and it would get power, be hooked up to the external monitor and all of the peripherals.

I don't see any word about licensing. I, for one, can't wait to see Monoprice start pumping out jackbox sets for this!

Thanks for mentioning Monoprice. Cool company.

Isn't it premature to call it a Standard? Apple may have pushed Intel to work on it but getting it adopted as a standard is gonna take time.

You are referring to the wrong definition of "standard". The article is referring to a "technical standard", not an "industry standard".

edit: unless you just mean that the approval process for the standard will take time.

That's what I meant. Unless it gets approved as a standard it's not going to be widespread.

Hmmm, when did that ever stop Apple before? 3.5" floppies and FireWire come to mind. :) At this point though, if Apple uses it, it is a standard. Touch screen smarphones come to mind! :)

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