Light Peak, in case you didn’t know, is a new universal interconnect being developed by Intel. It’s a bit like USB, but it conveys information via laser light rather than electric current. Intel plans for consumer PCs and laptops to be available with integrated Light Peak ports by the end of the year.

Is there much demand for a new interconnect? It’s notable that Intel hasn’t felt the need to build native USB 3 support into its chipsets – though that, admittedly, may be a chicken and egg scenario.

But Light Peak is a more capable technology than USB 3. It’s faster: the standard bandwidth is 10Gb/sec, with 100Gb/sec hardware already in the pipeline. And it’s more flexible, supporting not only peripherals like keyboards and printers, but also displays and direct network links between PCs.

Of course, you probably already know all this, as Intel hasn’t exactly been reticent about Light Peak’s abilities. We’ve seen several presentations and press releases on the subject since Light Peak was first announced at last year’s Intel Developer Forum, and only last month the company invited our own Barry Collins to Brussels to see a prototype Light Peak laptop in action. Indeed, they were so happy with his report, it’s now posted on the wall of the company’s photonics lab in Santa Clara:

How do I know this? Well, as it happens I was there this morning for, yes, yet another Light Peak presentation, this time with an emphasis on the engineering and technical implementation. And I have to say, I’m coming to understand Intel’s enthusiasm.

Bright science

I’ll be honest: the engineering side of things went largely over my head. The machinery looked formidable, as did the equations and diagrams scribbled on the walls; but these guys are doing cutting edge research and you’d probably need PhDs in several different fields to really follow it all.

Still, I did pick up a few fascinating titbits. For example, I had assumed that binary data would be transmitted by simply switching the laser on and off, but apparently at high speeds this can lead to bits getting “smeared” together, owing to the time it takes for the laser to warm up and cool down. So in fact Light Peak splits a constant laser into two beams and applies selective modulation to one of them before recombining them, encoding the data in the interference patterns. Pretty ingenious if you ask me.

Similarly, it’s possible to increase the bandwidth of a single optical channel by combining multiple lasers of different colours and separating the beams out at the receptor end. Our host, Intel fellow Mario Paniccia, demonstrated a 200Gb/sec interconnect based on such a system – though this particular prototype is only a stepping stone on the way to a 1Tb/sec link.

The consumer end

Of more direct interest, though, was the practical side of things. After the rather overwhelming tour of the labs, I was finally allowed to play with Light Peak myself – probably, in fact, on the very same laptop that Barry had already seen in Brussels. As he noted at the time, prototype Light Peak hardware runs over a hybrid USB 3 connector, with an optical interface embedded alongside the electrical one:

Mr Paniccia stated several times that this hasn’t been confirmed as the final connector for Light Peak; but it’s clearly an ingenious marriage, combining the new technology with legacy USB compatibility, plus an electrical connection that can be used for power (which, of course, can’t be carried over a pure optical link). I would guess Intel is being cautious not because it reckons it can do better, but simply because it hasn’t yet secured approval from the USB standards body for this rather radical upgrade to the standard connectors.

Many connections in one

The best, though, was yet to come. After Mario Pannicia had introduced the hardware, silicon photonics manager Victor Krutul gave a practical demonstration involving a simple chain of Light Peak devices – a notebook connected to a desktop PC, which was in turn connected to a monitor. He configured the notebook to display video on the monitor, passing through the desktop PC; then showed that, while this video link remained active, it was simultaneously possible to copy files back and forth between the two computers over the same cable. Yes, Light Peak can handle multiple data connections, even ones with different endpoints, over a single physical link.

This is terrifically liberating. Admittedly, it may not increase your actual productivity, but it simplifies the cabling enormously. Now you can, for example, connect a PC to a monitor, daisy-chain a second display off the first and connect a printer at the end of the chain. It’s far neater than what we have now, and it’s all done via standard cables and connectors.

Indeed, next time you buy a laptop, Light Peak could mean you no longer have to think about USB / eSATA / FireWire / video ports. A few general-purpose Light Peak ports is all you’ll need to construct a web of peripherals and PCs in whatever configuration you please. Even the most compact devices will be able to support a full range of connection types.

Meanwhile, in the server and workstation markets, Intel also plans to promote Light Peak as an internal connector. It is, after all, faster than a QPI link or a PCI-E x16 slot, and can run for tens of metres without suffering from latency, degradation or interference. That opens the door to modular designs that are far easier to cool, maintain and expand than current systems.

Interestingly, Mario Paniccia suggested that it may even be possible to retrofit the technology onto existing systems: he showed how a QPI to Light Peak adaptor might sit between the CPU and its socket.

Come into the light

Of course, if Light Peak is going to catch on in the mainstream the price will have to be right: no one’s talking about costs just yet, but tiny lasers probably don’t come for free. And it’ll need peripheral support too. Intel plans to ease the transition by providing Light Peak adaptors for some connectors, such as DisplayPort (seen in prototype below);  but this of course limits the daisy-chaining capabilities that are one of Light Peak’s most attractive features.

All the same, Light Peak has to be an early contender for the most exciting technology of 2011. I know I’ve been caught out by Intel before: last year I proposed the Larrabee multi-core graphics card as one of the top ten technologies of 2010, mere weeks before the project was shelved.

But the simple fact is that, unlike Larrabee, Light Peak works – brilliantly.

“Dude, someone’s snapped the end off your USB stick.” That’s what you’d probably say if you saw the new Lexar Echo ZE flash drive sitting on my desk.

Yet I can assure you, as one dude to another, that no one has. What you see above is the whole thing. Somehow, while I was briefly looking the other way, flash drives have become so compact that the entire device is now basically the size of the plug.

Billions of bits

And this isn’t a little 512MB drive either — not that 512MB is actually little. In these days of terabyte hard disks we’ve become accustomed to thinking of anything less than a gigabyte as piddling small change; but 512MB is still 4,294,967,296 binary cells. That’s a lot of cells. If each one were a mere millimetre in size, 4,294,967,296 of them in a row would stretch from here to Baghdad. Don’t ask about latency.

Yet what we have here is even more impressive. The Lexar Echo ZE is a 32GB device, which according to Excel means it holds an amazing 2.74878E+11 bits. At one millimetre per bit, that’s enough bits to reach three quarters of the way to the moon.

The Echo ZE crams its 274 billion cells into a tiny nub roughly a quarter of a cubic centimetre in volume

Of course, one millimetre per bit is a wholly imaginary scale, which I made up simply because a millimetre is pretty much the smallest unit of measurement I can visualise. In reality, the Echo ZE crams its 274 billion cells into a tiny nub roughly a quarter of a cubic centimetre in volume. If my GCSE maths hasn’t wholly deserted me, this means that, on average, each cubic millimetre of this thing stores around 131MB of data. If you’re old, like me, you may enjoy visualising that as 373 5.25″ floppy disks, teetering in an unlikely column.

An archive in your pocket

Though this advance in storage density is strictly speaking only quantitative, it opens up whole new possibilities. The Echo ZE is marketed as a backup drive that’s compact enough to leave plugged in at all times, and that’s a pretty ingenious angle — look out for a review soon.

But personally, as soon as I saw the Echo ZE I started thinking about how convenient it would be to keep multiple OS distributions in my pocket, not to mention applications, perhaps a copy of the PC Pro benchmarks, even – why not? – a whole library of books, films and TV shows.

(Eventually the idea of carrying data anywhere will be absurd, of course, because it’ll all be floating about in the cloud, ready to be accessed from wherever you happen to be. But if you think that’s viable today, click here and let me know when you get bored. For bonus points, try it over a 3G connection.)

Size and capacity

To be fair, the Echo ZE isn’t the most capacious USB flash drive we’ve seen: that would be Kingston’s 256GB DataTraveler 300. I shudder to think how many bits that one holds. But the Kingston drive is, by the standards of these things, a comparatively chunky device. If I were to keep it in my pocket I would be inviting an unending stream of comedy from my hilarious colleagues with respect to the bulge in my trousers. Since the DataTraveler 300 still sells for over £600, I would also be inviting a well-deserved mugging.

The Echo ZE, by contrast, is so tiny and light that you can stick it in a pocket and genuinely forget about it until you need it. Plus, since it costs little more than £60, losing it wouldn’t be quite such a disaster.

Having said that, since it has no sort of clip or cord to attach to a key-ring, I would lose it. And the loss wouldn’t be merely financial: think of the data! 274 billion bits gone, just like that, fallen through a hole in my pocket, or accidentally swept into a friend’s bin.

But to me that is, in a slightly cussed way, perhaps the most inspiring reflection of all. How fantastic it is that we live in a world where you can so easily misplace ninety thousand floppy disks’ worth of data! And it makes me wonder — what might we be able to lose tomorrow?

The first USB 3 external hard disk has arrived in the PC Pro Labs – a pre-production sample courtesy of our friends at Asus – and initial impressions are simply excellent.

The chart above may need a little explaining. The first two groups of results show how long it took, in seconds, to copy a folder of 3,000 small files, totalling 300MB in size, back and forth between a RAM disk and an external hard drive using various connections. The 650MB results are based on the same process using a single 650MB file.

The USB 2 and USB 3 figures were obtained by simply connecting the external drive first to a USB 2 port and then to a USB 3 one. The eSATA figures are from the A-Listed Iomega Professional External Hard Drive.

The results

As you can see, USB 3 left USB 2 comprehensively in the dust in every test. That’s no surprise: USB 2 has always been a bottleneck for external hard disks, with even “Hi-Speed” mode limiting transfer speeds to a theoretical maximum of 480Mb/sec. USB 3 adds a new “SuperSpeed” mode that increases the bandwidth by a whopping ten times, yielding greater throughput than a typical SATA connection and enabling external drives to communicate at full speed. In our real-world 650MB test, the external drive connected via USB 3 averaged sustained read and write rates of around 120MB/sec, beating even our eSATA unit.

Our 300MB test was a little less clear-cut: USB 3 raced past USB 2 as expected, but eSATA performed erratically. In the write test, eSATA was three times as fast as USB 3, but in the read test it was barely faster than USB 2. It seems the SATA interface makes better use of buffering than USB when it comes to writing files, but it doesn’t read files back so efficiently. Overall, if pressed as to whether USB 3 was better than eSATA, we’d have to say “mostly”.

The connector

One interesting aspect of USB 3 is that it brings a new connector — the first one since USB 1 was specified in 1996 that actually involves an electrical change, rather than simply being a different shape. Previous versions of USB have used four-pin connectors, but to enable “SuperSpeed” transfers, USB 3 devices use new eight-pin connectors.

The upgrade has been very thoughtfully implemented, though. You can still use a four-pin cable to hook up a USB 3 device to your PC — you’ll just be stuck at USB 2 speeds.

And if you have a USB 3 cable you can still plug it into a USB 2 socket on your PC: again, your device will simply fall back to USB 2 speeds.

The only thing you can’t do is plug a USB 3 cable into a USB 2 device. That’s because the new USB-B plug is physically larger than the old USB-B socket, to connect with the four extra pins which have been piggy-backed onto the top of the existing design (pictured).

The future

Will USB 3 catch on? Technically speaking, it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t. The performance benefits are simply unanswerable. Of course, not all USB devices will benefit, since things like printers and flash memory devices don’t saturate an existing USB 2 connection. But USB 3 ports and devices retain full compatibility with USB 2, so there’s really no reason not to switch.

(Indeed, despite what you may hear on this week’s PC Pro podcast, it appears that USB 3 even maintains support for USB 1.1 devices and ports.)

The transition may be slow, though. Neither Intel nor AMD yet supports USB 3 at the chipset level, so for now you’ll find it only on premium motherboards with dedicated third-party USB 3 controllers (such as the Asus P7P55D-E or the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3). If you want to add it to an existing system, you’ll need to invest in a PCI-E controller card. It’s safe to say that, with these as its only distribution channels, USB 3 isn’t going to flood the mainstream in the immediate future.

All the same, if USB 3 achieves even niche penetration, it will probably be the end of eSATA — always an awkward bus, technically superior but fatally narrow in function, unsupported by most laptops and often only half-implemented on the desktop. Come, USB 3, come, and put this unhappy also-ran out of its misery.

The bottom line

USB 3 marries everything that’s good about USB to performance that’s better than eSATA in most scenarios. To that extent, I am hopelessly in love with it.

But an interface is only as useful as the things it connects, and right now a quick Google search reveals precisely zero USB 3 devices on general sale.

So we’ll have to wait a little longer to see what sort of USB 3 devices appear, and how much they cost, and how quickly consumers take the nascent technology to their bosom. My suspicion, though, is that this upgrade could catch on very quickly indeed.

Francis Ford Coppolla’s masterpiece, The Godfather; one of the finest films ever produced, a tale of family, power and betrayal back in 1940s New York and Sicily; Marlon Brando’s finest hour, Al Pacino’s defining moment, one of the most celebrated movies of all time.

Paramount Pictures is understandably proud of The Godfather, and its flawless sequel (we’ll ignore the third). So proud that it’s very selective with movie tie-ins – we can’t have any old tat sullying the Godfather brand, now. Can we?

“Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced that the firm has signed a licensing agreement with Paramount Licensing Inc. granting rights to manufacture and market USB Flash drives based on Paramount Pictures movie title, ‘The Godfather’.”

I can only imagine someone at Paramount Licensing hasn’t actually seen the Godfather. Perhaps they don’t like the cinema, and assume all movies are a bit like The Net, starring Sandra Bullock. Or maybe Al Pacino used a memory stick at some point during the steaming turd that was Ocean’s Thirteen. I don’t know.

What I do know is that Don Corleone didn’t email anyone an offer they couldn’t refuse. And I’m pretty sure Michael didn’t win Appollonia’s heart by pestering her to show her bits on a chat-room webcam.

But Super Talent’s press release reckons we should all have an open mind.

“The introduction of movie-themed USB drives marks the beginning of a new era for the Flash industry. These drives will capture the spirit of ‘The Godfather,’ and will be a sure hit with millions of Don Corleone fans.”

Well – drumroll please – here it is. The perfect 1940s movie tie-in. The flash drive that captures the spirit of the greatest Mafia movie in history. Just look at the design, so authentic it has…err…the logo. A new era? Only for baffling PR.

But this flash drive needs seeing to be believed. It’s been passed all round the office, where it’s invariably been greeted with ooohs and aaaahs of grinning appreciation, and it’s already been suggested that we buy up a job lot of them to use in the Labs.

The reason for all the fuss?

Well, the Corsair Flash Voyager Mini is barely bigger then a 10p piece; it weighs so little we hardly even noticed it in our hand, let alone a pocket; it’s rubberised for durability, and holds a perfectly reasonable 4GB of data via its retractable USB connector.

Oh, and did we mention it’s going on sale for less than £16 inc VAT?

Considering our components editor paid £50 for a single gigabyte of bulky storage just a couple of years ago, the inexorable march and miniaturisation of USB storage is plain to see. And if this is how things are going it won’t be long before we’re carrying our entire hard drives in a pocket with our front door keys – for better or worse.

The ludicrously tempting 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager Mini is available here.

UPDATE: The Corsair is almost exactly the same thickness as a standard USB connector. And for those who reckon it blocks adjacent USB ports…

Until yesterday, T-Mobile had provided us with the larger Huawei E220 USB modem you can see at the top of the photo here. And to be honest, it was pretty ropey. Tim Danton described last week the trouble he had installing the device and the download speeds we recorded – even when sat upon the 6th floor balcony here at Dennis Towers – were distinctly underwhelming. Speeds were typically hovering around 300-400Kb/sec, placing T-Mobile well behind rivals such as Vodafone and 3.

Then we spotted that the company had released a new Huawei USB stick (dubbed web’n'walk Stick III) that plugs straight into the PC – near identical hardware to that used by Vodafone and 3, in fact. We badgered T-Mobile’s press office to send us a test unit and the results have been nothing short of remarkable. Download speeds are now hovering around 2Mb/sec – around five times faster than what we were getting with the E220 modem. Even on my train journey from Sussex to London the connection is reasonably solid, whereas before it was decidedly choppy.

If you’re thinking of signing up for T-Mobile’s mobile broadband, make sure you opt for the Stick III rather than the E220. If you’re still not sure what mobile broadband network to hook up with, make sure you read issue 166 of PC Pro, on sale 19 June, where you can find out how all five of the UK networks compare.