Ableton Forum

Light Peak Coming in Early 2011

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/04/lig ... forefront/

Light Peak is now on track to appear in products in the first half of 2011--and likely earlier in the year than later, according to an industry source familiar with the progress of the technology. Light Peak is significantly faster than even USB 3.0, carrying data at 10 gigabits per second in both directions simultaneously.

Something along these lines should have been done years ago instead of every group coming up with its own version of a serial protocol and making sure each one of those bastards required a different plug type thus clogging up the back/front/top/side of my computer with 20 million different f*kn ports!

My motherboard already supports USB3.0.

Tone Deft wrote:funny, that's a good point. maybe wireless battery charger type technology will come into play. so, peripherals will get faster, you can throw more CPUs at the problem, I guess the PCI bus would be the next bottleneck.

happily, the pci bus got obsoleted by pci express since quite some years. that one should be good enough for a while.

and even while i have usb3 on my desktop, i couldn't care less. lightpeak will be awesome. usb3 never will. the only gain is for external hdds. but having one type of cable for everything, that's a real change. that's, then, a real universal serial bus.

The big headache with optical cable is power - or rather the lack of - unless you shine a rediculously powerful light source down it too with photocells at the other end

Perhaps the end result might be hydrid cables - optical pipes for data and copper conductors for power - I should think such cable would be rather expensive however.


[Edit: A quick read around suggests that there may be power coductors included, though not all devices might support this.]

ive have been wanting a new macbookpro, hopefully rme comes along with a soundcard soon after

zalo wrote:ive have been wanting a new macbookpro, hopefully rme comes along with a soundcard soon after

A light peak soundcard ?

Presumably the main advantage would amount to higher sample rates ? But won't we be needing beast like CPUs to take advantage of that ... ?

dum wrote:

zalo wrote:ive have been wanting a new macbookpro, hopefully rme comes along with a soundcard soon after

A light peak soundcard ?

Presumably the main advantage would amount to higher sample rates ? But won't we be needing beast like CPUs to take advantage of that ... ?

from everything that i have read

generally faster protocol = lower latency and higher I/Os

right now all benefits are theoretical until products begin to be developed

but if light peak is supposed to replace all other buses i would assumed that a light peak soundcard wouldnt be too far off in the future and have some sort of benefit above firewire

someone correct me if I'm wrong but:

CPU issues have a much more dramatic effect on the latency than the firewire/usb protocol
We can all get low latencies as it is...by being thrifty with CPU. Light Peak isn't going to change that rule ?

More I/O...true, but how many do you actually need and how many I/Os can your CPU/Hard-drive handle at 96khz ?
I've yet to reach that ceiling with my firewire soundcard...16 i/o + 8 adat...it's my CPU that chokes long before the firewire

Sorry but I remain unconvinced. As far as I'm concerned we need monster machines and a personal necessity for way above average amounts of simultaneous I/Os until I see any (home studio) users really benefiting from a light peak soundcard.



Now a light peak external hard-drive on the other hand...

latency can only be fought by cutting steps, or doing everything faster. there are a certain minimum amount of hops from the cpu that generates a sound to the speaker that plays it (just as there are hops from the source mic to the cpu to process, and then send over).

those steps currently can get reduced a bit, but the only other way is to increase overall system speed. if you put your 2.5ghz cpu (+- the average for laptops currently) to 5ghz, and everything (ram, busses, chipset) to 2x the speed, too, you can reduce it to half. but that can't happen right now (which is why we got multicore systems) due to physical limits.

graphene could make that happen, showing promise to have 10-100ghz cpu's in the future. that could cut down latency to 1/4th to 1/40th.


but anyways, lightpeak will be awesome. more bandwith allows lower latency for high-data stuff like screens. and the fact to have the same wire for everything (and more than one kind of data on one cable) will massively reduce setup-complexity. which will be awesome. (currently, we install check-outs in stores, there are 13 (or more?!) different wires per check-out. imagine just having one type)

but yeah, power over the wire should be needed (or wireless power for short range (5-10m))

i understand that everything adds to the latency, not just the wire/protocol/interface

but on the rme forums people have done side by side comparisons of the fireface400 and the multiface, and they are able to get lower latencies with the multiface on the same system

the hdspe expresscard adapter for the multiface only runs at 2.5 Gbps and firewire400 runs at 3.2 Gbps

hdspe doesnt have to comply with the firewire protocol, and therefore can get lower latencies

since light peak can run any protocol, theoretically the soundcard can send a less CPU intensive data stream

also i have a live setup, this isnt for recording, hard drive speed really doesnt come into play, and my setup very soon is going to need more than 24 I/Os and i don't see the new MBPs struggling too much processor wise, rumor has it they will be possibly running sandy bridge processors

i dont know, i would have a use for it, i think there are enough people out there that could use it, it seems to me that light peak has a lot of support behind it and i cant see a reason why manufactures wouldnt start making devices much like they started with firewire

lightpeak will most likely get an usb like base device identification protocol. after that, yes, one can use what ever one want to communicate (this is true for anything, btw: there are special usb hdds that have own drivers. if you have the special driver, they send around 50-60mb/s. if they use the default usb driver (a system of a friend f.e.) it will have the typical 20-30mb/s).

it should reduce latencies. but my main reason for wanting a lightpeak soundcard: one wire for everything. just imagine using the same cable for your soundcard, your external (touch)screen, your hdds, your network, actually the mixer could, too. lightpeak could replace everything in the long run.

a true usb (universal serial bus). and hopefully with just one way to plug in, and just one type of plug (damn you, usb).

one can dream.

Some people think that this is coming this week...

davepermen wrote:lightpeak will most likely get an usb like base device identification protocol. after that, yes, one can use what ever one want to communicate (this is true for anything, btw: there are special usb hdds that have own drivers. if you have the special driver, they send around 50-60mb/s. if they use the default usb driver (a system of a friend f.e.) it will have the typical 20-30mb/s).

it should reduce latencies. but my main reason for wanting a lightpeak soundcard: one wire for everything. just imagine using the same cable for your soundcard, your external (touch)screen, your hdds, your network, actually the mixer could, too. lightpeak could replace everything in the long run.

a true usb (universal serial bus). and hopefully with just one way to plug in, and just one type of plug (damn you, usb).

one can dream.

One cable to rule them all - one driver to fuck it all up!

As far as I know the idea is you can send multiple protocols down the same bus. So you can send USB3-like data packets along with displayport video etc.

Should be starting as copper 10Gbit/s, but the idea seems to be moving on to fibre-optic at 100Gbit. Supposedly this may involve hybrid optical/copper cables so you can power stuff too.

Might be on the new Macbooks possibly coming out tomorrow if you're impatient...