Light Peak

[Uniquely]

So has anyone been keeping up with Light Peak? Rumored to be coming out in late 2010... it's supposed to be a replacement for USB, Firewire, and even HDMI. Looks like promising promising stuff.

Light Peak is Intel's code-name for a new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other in a peripheral bus. It has the capability to deliver high bandwidth, starting at 10 Gbps, with the potential ability to scale to 100 Gbps. It is intended as a single universal replacement for current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, and HDMI. In comparison to these buses, Light Peak is much faster, longer ranged, smaller, and more flexible in terms of protocol support.

Light Peak was developed as a way to reduce the proliferation of ports on modern computers. Bus systems like USB were intended to do the same, and successfully replaced a number of older technologies like PS/2 and Centronics printer ports. However, increasing bandwidth demands have led to the introduction a new series of high-performance systems like E-SATA and DisplayPort that USB and similar systems could not address. Light Peak provides enough bandwidth to allow all of these systems to be driven over a single type of interface, and in many cases on a single cable using a daisy chain.