Maximum PC

It does appear that Intel is making progress on this technology. "Light Peak begins at 10Gbits/sec, simultaneously in both directions," That would be truly amazing.

From PC Pro news: Intel shows off first Light Peak laptop

Granted the articles I linked to in my original post, Might Be Why Intel Is Holding Up USB 3??, were a bit optimistic in there time tables.

I just hope it is not limited to just chips on the motherboards (a la need a new mobo) but also maybe an add in PCIe card. For sure would put an end to HDD/SSD bottlenecks. If it could be extended to SATA besides USB type applications.

Looks like Light Peak has quite a bit of future, though I would expect it to be mostly implemented in networking at first. Though I think USB 3.0 certainly has a place alongside Light Peak looking forward. You know how awesome it would be if USB 3.0 replaced SATA ports on motherboards? A USB 3.0 port has enough bandwidth for even the fastest SSDs and the data cable can carry enough current to power the drive, removing the need for two cables going to each drive. It would be wonderful for standardization, simplicity, and cable management.

I hear ya on the possibilities for USB3. which is what I'm thinking for the Light Peak. Since it can have the copper in the same cable for power supply purposes.

These are just a few reasons I'm not all hot to trot on jumping on USB3 and 6 gig SATA. Even without Light Peak in the offing, USB 3 would seem to cancel out the need for eSATA ports. Well I guess in non raid applications anyway. Though it seems that Light Peak could do it all a hell of a lot faster. As in bring storage interactions that much closer to system speeds. Which is what SSD's are all about.

Well, that's the least of our worries. It's not copper wire based, so everyone with a networked home or business would need to gut it in order to lay fiber down. I'd have no problem with buying a new board if that's all it needed. Fiber is expensive, hard to terminate, need special tools, no sharp bends...man; if typical wiring took me a month to get done, fiber would take me half a year.
---------------------------------------
Some boards already have the USB 3.0 on the rear I/O (Extreme III), but the products to plug into them to try it out are slim to none. 170MB/s sounds nice, but I'd still rather lean on a fat network like Intel's working on with a large capacity file storing PC on one end of a cable. One TB just isn't enough for backup these days.

10G/s would be way ahead of what is needed for that though. With SSD's not going past 500MB/s in any configuration, 4TB of spindle drives don't even tap out S/ATA 3G, let alone 6G. Light Peak is progress, but we have a long way to go as home consumers to really need it at this point. Hopefully late next year we'll see it roll out.

Like everything else I guess we will just have to wait to see how they implement it. While I know all to well not to be counting chickens till they hatch, I would hope that the "up to 100 meter cable length" is not overly optimistic. Even if that is overly optimistic, it would seem that it could have a profound effect within a machine for further reducing communication times between drives, etc and the processor. Any way it is still to early to tell where it will go and how.

Well, it's fiber optics to me...so I don't understand too much new to this since we have enough fiber optics laid in the last decade to probably go to the moon and back. We have optical outs for sound onboard...but are severely limited on length. I guess that's the big deal here then. To make the communications go 100 meters and remain reliable, then the light amplification would have to be pretty high while remaining in a very small package.

(LOL Tug...I thought I was having a flashback after reading the other thread You're the last to post, so you can just hit the "X" on your post to make it go away...)

Scary looking back at that thread ain't it? Accurate like a sniper

That's what happens when simple folk have 15 or so tabs open at the same time and try to multitask.