USB vs. Lightpeak

a confidence trick invented by the Swiss. Oh that's an interesting thought. Sorry. Normally I would comment on the quote of the week or or of the podcast, and and I was thinking, oh, that's that's interesting. Sorry. Yeah, I don't really ever come by. I don't know if you recognize the actually thinking of the origin of that quote, but I'll tell you about it after the show. Okay, so today we're going to talk about some well I was gonna say competing technologies, but according to at least

one party in this, it's not supposed to compete. But two different methods of transmitting data from computers to other devices, or even from the Internet to a computer, depending on how you're using them or uh, I would say, in in in one case, within the computer itself, yes, also possibility. Uh yeah, so we're talking about USB three point oh and Intel's light peak technology. Yes, one of these. You

would sort of probably be expected to know. USB is pretty ubiquitous as it has been, uh since I would guess the late nineties or at least early two thousand's UM, which if I'm not mistaken, until actually had quite a bit of a responsibility in developing USB in the first place. Yeah. In fact, Intel worked quite hard on USB three point oh as well. Uh, it's the the universal serial bus is what we're talking about here. And and you know,

you're probably familiar with these. You probably have devices that you hook up through your computer that have you have that same UM plug that goes into the computer ports. Uh, you know, everything from cameras to cell phones to uh external drives, UM two keyboards, mice, joysticks, all sorts of things. I've even seen some touchscreen displays that are USB connected connectible where you can have a second display up, which is a little interesting. It's actually that's that's probably taxing

USB two point oh to its to its limits. But yeah, I mean this was just the purpose of the Universal Serial Bus was really to kind of help simplify ports on a computer. Right. Oh yes, but because I remember the days of Scuzzy. Um, yeah, Scuzzy for those of you who aren't familiar with it, good now, I know. Scuzzy actually was was pretty nice. It was speedy for its day. Um. But my my first two computers, being Commodore amigas, they used Scuzzy ports, or at least for

most of the stuff that I had. Actually you would have parallel ports on those as well. UM. But the thing that annoyed me about Scuzzy, uh was that you could only have up to eight devices attached to your computer. Um. You would hook it up by this really thick cable. Um thick especially compared to to something like USB one and two anyway, and uh you had to actually set

the address on the back of the device itself. I had um an external drive that I used to use, and you'd have to uh at my old job actually um where you would actually have to turn the thing around and uh, you know, actually change the number and yourself you could actually see the number it was. It was one of those little digital counters like you would see on a handheld counter. It's what kind of funny. Um,

so you said it, you know one through eight. Uh, and if you had a competing and uh something on that address, then it would cause problems. Also, you had to have a terminator at the end on the last switch, so if you had don't call the I knew he

was gonna go there. No, you had to have say you had a uh an external drive on your computer, it would have an outport as well, so it would have it would be out to the computer and then you would have an import and if nothing was coming into it, if you didn't plug in the terminator, the computer wouldn would theoretically continue to look for the other device which wasn't plugged in, and it would it would slow things down sometimes depending on what you were doing,

cause it not to work. Um. So you had to have this little uh it's kind of hard to describe it. It was almost like a dongle, little plastic and metal device that you would shove in there that you know and lock into place that it would know, No, there's no other devices on here. You have the two external drives. One of them is you know, number four. Number one of them is number seven. You know, I know that

this is the stuff that's on there. And the best part of all, if you wanted to add something, you had to turn off your computer, turn off the device. Uh. Some would even say unplugged the devices, although it never seemed to bother mind rather than the four computers that I blew up when I didn't I'm kidding, but yeah, you're supposed to turn off everything before you you know, plugged or unplugged any of the devices into this guzzy chain. And uh, my first computer with USB was the very

very first iMac. I actually got it on the day it came out, and uh, it was the first computer I had to have USB. And the idea of being able to hot swap devices and have up to a hundred twenty seven instead of eight, it was so nice. Yeah. Hot swapping, by the way, in case you don't know, that just means that you can unplug or plug in a device at any time, whether your computers on or off,

and that in theory, nothing bad should happen it. What should have but is that the computer should check to see what kind of device has just been hooked up to it and whether or not the computer has the correct driver to interact with that device, and if not, it prompts you to either you know, load the driver

or try and search for it. Yep. And that's another one of the nice things about USB is that it's you can find it on Windows machines, you can find it on Linux machines, you can find it on Macintosh, and for the most part, you can buy peripherals that will work with all three or at least two of those, as long as there is a driver available for them.

And that wasn't necessarily the case before. So USB is really kind of um made everything a lot easier, and fire FireWire two to an extent, but FireWire didn't catch on like USB did. The FireWire was mostly the domain of Apple. Um. Yeah, the the sony for example, with the USB thing, and and the idea that you can

use the same peripherals on different devices. I have a couple of my own that I've swapped out between my Mac and my uh my PC, including and this this got a lot of mirth off the internet when I took a picture of it. Uh A, I've used my Mac keyboard to hook up to my work PC because, as we all know, the left side of my keyboard

on my work PC doesn't work. So and that was the USB keyboard that I happened to have at home was my Mac keyboard, and I was like, huh, I wonder if this will work, And sure enough it does. The Apple button doesn't do anything. But other than that, um, and I've I've hooked up a PC keyboard to my Mac.

So there you go. So at any rate, the USB solution was to try and cut down on all these different ports, and of course there are a lot more besides just the scuzzy I mean you had serial ports, you had parallel ports, you had the keyboard and mice jacks that you would have to insert the you know, you plug your your mouth or your keyboard in. They have those little round plugs if you remember. You now you've got a lot of USB one so you don't

have to worry about that kind of stuff. Um, and it's simplified things a bit, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was thinking about that too. Um. The nine pin connectors that you used to see on the old Attaris where the ports that also worked with the Amiga. So all my um, I could use my joysticks and stuff to play games with. But now if I were going to do that on a Windows or a Macro, a Linux machine. You could buy a USB joystick and it would work across all of them. You have the same port. You

don't have to mess with all that stuff anymore. That's nice. Now. One of the limitations now we're currently the standard currently is USB two point oh. Yes, that's watching away for years. Yes exactly, it has been that way for years. Uh and and we've known that USB three point oh. They finalized the standard for that in two thousand and eight, but we still haven't really seen a wide rollout, and we'll probably get into a little controversy about that in

a little bit. But the uh there, there's some limitations to USB two point oh. One of which is the speed UM. Now it US be two point That is fast enough for most regular applications, like if you want to use a keyboard or joystick or a mouse. The bandwidth is fine for that, you know, it's you don't need something that's going to be super fast. And the bandwidth, by the way, is four hundred and eighty megabits per

second UM. But if you want to do something like back up your hard drive to an external drive and you're using a USB cord and you've got a massive hard drive, right, you know, yeah, it's gonna take some time. So you've got like a hard drive that's like you know, you could have up to a terabyte, right, I mean or more really, but you want to back that up because we we always say you should back up your

hard drive. One of the things that makes that less than easy is the fact that are a lot of our cables don't have the bandwidth capacity to make that data transfer at a very fast clip, so you have to wait quite a bit while you do it. It's always nice to schedule at for the middle of the night when you're asleep theoretically, but you're asleep in the middle of the night. Man, I kind of figured that stuff out. So, uh so USB three point oh ups that speed and by ten times actually four point eight

gigabytes or gigabits sorry four points Yeah. As soon as I said, I was like, well, you need to correct that before we get letters four point eight gigabits per second, and uh so that's yeah, it's ten times the speed of u USB two point oh. And they talk the I remember hearing things like, well, at that speed, you could you could rip a Blu ray disc and just a matter of moments comparatively speaking, like thirty seconds. So there's this amazing ability to uh to transfer data at

a really good clip. And just like USB two point oh uh, it is capable of powering devices as well. There there are um enough, the way the cables work. There are four cables in USB two point yes, there are eight in USB three point oh. Yes. Now two of those cables are for ones of power cable, ones of ground cable. Yeah. Um yeah, I had I had gotten my notes from from Norman Chan and Maximum PC who wrote a nifty article. It really well. The title says it all everything you need to know about USB

three point oh plus first spliced cable photos. They actually have pictures. He said that there are five new cables are yes, um but yeah, it's basically you're transmitting more information over that distance. So I don't mean to contradict you. No, no, no, that's right. I would rather I would rather have the correct information. Well, here's here's how I understand it. So

USB two point oh. One of the other limitations is that it does this thing called polling, which is where you know you can only so do you like your data in this location where than you I shouldn't have pause to let you say something. I can tell you had something to say. But respondents say they want their data on this hard drive at any rate. Worry about that, ladies and gentlemen. Uh No, the USB two point it can only send data in one direction at a time, right, exactly.

So you're like, let's say you've got a smartphone that you're using, and you want to move files to and from the smartphone, So you say, pulling pictures off the smartphone and you're putting music onto it. Right that that that could happen. You can't do both of those things at the same time using USB two point oh. Right, You're gonna have to do one first and then the other.

Right now. USB three point oh, because of the additional wires that they've added, they've the standard allows UH two a well, simultaneous transmission of data both to and from the device at the same time. I said that simultaneously in the same time. This is what happens when we

record in the morning. Oh my goodness, people. But but yes, you can actually see these these lines now if you if you look at the end of a regular USB uh connector, you'll see, um it sort of reminds me about sandwich cookie in a way, because half of it is an open space and the other half is seems solid. And that's how that's what frustrates so many people about it.

They know that they've got the cable, they're reaching around the back end of their of their PC and they know they've got it in the slot, but the closed end is on the closed end, and you have to flip the plug over and then find the the connector again, and it's it's frustrating. It's not that big a deal, but if you look at it, you'll know what I'm talking about. But on the USB three connector, you can actually see where the other wires it plugs in the

same way, it's backward compatible as far as using support. Now, you would actually need a USB three card on your computer for it to use USB three. But let's see you have an older computer and somebody lent you a USB three cable. You could still use that on your computer and you would be able to see where the wire connectors are on the closed off looking in, they're actually visible to you, so you could tell just by looking at it whether it's a USB two or USB

three chord. Right and and just to clarify a little bit, you can use USB three on a USB two ports, a USB three cable, and a USB two port, like Chris was saying, but it will, of course it will. The data will move at USB two speeds right because it doesn't have the connectors to make it work. And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be confusing. No, no, not at all. I just wanted to make sure I

covered that. Uh. But the idea that it being backwards compatible, that stretches back to USB two, which was also backwards compatible with USB one. I mean you want to you want to make sure that you don't just wipe out someone's entire Like the whole purposes make life simpler. You don't want to make it more complicated by saying, okay,

all that stuff that you had no longer works. So now that we have these devices that require lots of data to transfer at high speeds, let's say that you want to back up your hard drive, or that you've captured a bunch of high definition video and you want to pull that from a camera onto your computer. Uh. USB two, I know, is starting to look a little slow. And that's why USB three point oh was was being put into play. It's also called superspeed USB because USB

two point it was called speed USB. So superspeed is the idea that it's gonna go much much faster, it's gonna continue to power these devices. It actually draws more power than than USB two point oh. USB two point oh, I think had a maximum of five milli amps and USB three point oh is nine miller amps. Um so for powered buses, it's it's that's a means it's gonna be able to power more power hungry devices. Yes, definitely, So that's kind of the story in USB three point oh.

Let's talk about light peak for a second. Okay, I think it's in transition. I think it's important to note that USB three if and if if I'm not mistaken, USB three is is only external, like you're going to hook up external peripherals with USB fight I know. However, white peak can be used on a motherboard to connect devices inside your computer. Is that yeah? Or or you

can use it as an external as well. This was sort of Intel's take on how can we simplify these uh, these ports even further than USB three point oh because USB three uh, you know, there's certain devices you can connect to like the external hard drives or the high definition cameras, but it still does not have the bandwidth necessary for other applications like driving a high definition monitor, or or replacing an HDM MY chord um or replacing

the Ethernet chord. You couldn't do that with USB three. The bandwidth isn't there. It's not really designed for that. So Intel was saying, well, what if we were to develop a technology that would allow us to essentially boil it down to one cable for data. You know, you could just have the same sort of cable. Essentially, your your computer would look like it would have a whole bunch of the same ports, and in theory, you could plug any cable into any of those ports and then

into any compatible device and it works. So you might have, you know, five cables, they're all identical, and one of them is going to an external display, and one of them is going to your high high definition camera, one of them is going to a an external hard drive, etcetera. So the way they decided to try and implement this

is through fiber optics. There there's a chip that is central to this system that UH would be installed on a motherboard and would transmit it would essentially translate binary data into optical data using a laser and UM fiber optic lines. I'm impressed that you managed to hold off saying laser. You know I did that to myself. UM. Yeah, I mean that's if you remember, we did a podcast not terribly longer last year on fiber optics UM and UH. Fiber optics are a much different animal as far as

the way they transmit information. They're going by light UM and they do have some advantages. UM. Now, when we talked about fiber optics in that podcast, we were talking about how delicate the lines are. You have to be very careful with that. Well, I did some research on light Peak for the podcast, and and tell claims that you can even tie the cable in a knot and it will still be able to transmit information very very quickly without you know, having to worry about damaging the

lines on the light peak transmitter. And that's funny because light peak may if you may never have heard of it, but this is something that's been in development for pretty

long time now. So it's like, actually, we were expecting to see products launching with light Peak, perhaps as early as late, but that didn't happen, and now we're hearing about it coming out in And the idea here is that, at least the initial idea is that you're using fiber optics to transmit data the there'd be two fiber optic lines that would be dedicated to transmitting data out and

two that would be dedicated to transmitting data in. So just like USB three point out, you could have simultaneous communication from both the device and the computer. And uh, the theoretical starting speed for light peak, and I say theoretical just because it hasn't hit the market really yet is ten gigabits per second. So that's more than twice as fast as USB three point out. Indeed it is. And uh that at that speed you still can't necessarily

replace things like HDMI chords. You would still need to get a little faster than that. But Intel says that within ten years that top speed will re a peak

of around a hundred gigabits per second. Now, at that speed, you're talking about using the potential for using this technology for everything from the cable that would go from your modem to your computer, so you would use the same sort of cable to hook up to your Internet connection as you would to your external hard drive or to another monitor, which is kind of a cool idea, right. You no longer have to worry about, oh gosh, I need this one specific cable, where the heck is that?

And you know, you start hunting through all your cables. Now you just have a pile o cables that are all the same and you just grab one, which is a great idea. The there's some limitations to light peak

as well. One of those is that we don't really know how light peak would provide power to devices, right because you have a lot of devices that either charge through USB or the The USB provides the power that the device needs to to operate as well as the data transfer, and light Peak on its own cannot really transmit power because you're talking about fiber optics, it's just light um and by light, we're using like I said,

lasers and little photovoltaic type sensors. So there would have to be some sort of either external power source to power these devices. Um, So you'd have one wire essentially going in to provide power and another wire coming in that would be the light peak wire, or you would have to pair light peak with copper wire of some sort. Yeah, because of course, uh, you know, the USB is using copper as it is in order to to do what

it does. So yeah, it seems like you would have to have something like that simply to avoid, um, you know that the charging having to worry about the charging issue. And people have come to expect that with USB and FireWire both being the connectors have choice for the majority of electronics over the past decade or so. Um, I think people sort of expect that, and they'll go, hey, this is great, it's really fast, but now I have to plug it in while I'm you know, I think

that that may throw people a little bit. Um. And and just while we've been talking, I did a little more additional research just to find out how many lines, and I found reputable sources saying four and five additional

lines on USB three it's a mystery. So um so I'm we may have to to uh post on on our Facebook feed or something that we can find out definitively one way the end, because I thought, you know, I had gotten it from a reputable source, and you got your from reputable source, and we will go out, we will find a USB three point accord and we will cut it open. Okay, then that'll tell us right there, yep,

but yeah, we will cry. But I don't have a device that can actually operate under USB three point over right now, so it's not at the at the moment, it's sort of a moot point. Um. But yeah. And that was one of the things though about light Peak two is that on its debut it may not necessarily be using fiber optic, right That is an interesting point. We heard from Intel that the initial light Peak wire is not actually using fiber optics to transmit data through

the wire. It's going to use copper, which, of course, again it is like all the other cables. So but supposedly they have found a way until has found a way to uh to transmit data at that ten gigabits per second speed that was supposed to be the starting speed,

which is interesting. Uh. One of the problems, one of the other problems about using copper is that electricity can create interference, you know our f interference and um USB three point I was kind of pushing that envelope right now as it is, so to have an even greater bandwidth of copper means that you have to you know, think about those problems about shielding the cable and such way so that the interference is at a minimum or else you're going to have problems when you're transmitting data.

And so it's a lot of people have started talking about that. I've heard some snarky comments talk calling the first generation of light Peak copper peak because it's not using light it's using copper um. Maybe it'll be light copper. Maybe maybe it will, it could be, I don't know. But the the other discussion, besides the fact that the first generation of light Peak will not actually be using

fiber optics in the cable, the chip is different. The chip could have you can have fiber optics within the motherboard, but the actual cable that you're using to hook up to the various devices is going to have copper in it. The other big discussion is is light peak going to make USB three point oh a moot point from the start? Like, is is it an also ran? Not if it never makes it to market. The thing is right now, they've been promised for years and they're just hasn't been any moved.

I mean, there's been movement, but you just don't see them on store shelves either one of them really in any quantity, even though I think you would agree. I mean, you've seen some uh, some displays this at c E S. Yeah, I've seen yeah, demos of light Peak have been at c E S uh previously. You And there are USB three point oh devices and motherboards that are out there on the market right now. You can go out and buy them, but they aren't as plentiful as they as

you might think they should be. Considering that USB two point oh is such a wide standard, you would imagine that USB three point i would get adopted fairly quickly. And depending upon whom you ask, you might hear that the adoption rates are actually faster than USB two point oh, and other people say, like, well that that has maybe.

But USB two point oh is an accepted standard, so you would think USB three point would be adopted very quickly, especially since it was introduced the standard was finalized in

two thousand eight. UM. One of the the allegations that I've heard some journalists levy against Intel is that Intel is specifically dragging its heels in supporting USB three point oh in order to give light Peak an advantage, because you know Intel, Intel's not just doing this light Peak project until makes chips and and chip sets from other boards. And if Intel doesn't create sets that support USB three point oh, then some one of the most popular chip

manufacturers is in effect holding back USB three point oh adoption. Now, Intel, for its part, says that's a lot of bologna that they are not trying to sabotage USB three point out that in that light Peak isn't even intended to replace USB three point oh. I've seen reports, essentially kind of in a mysterious way, say that light Peak will work with USB three point oh. And whether or not that means that you will have light Peak cables that have a USB connector on them, I don't know. They haven't

really gone into detail to explain what they mean by that. Well, you know, getting back to what I said earlier. Um, I remember in the when I first learned about like light Peak, hearing that it was supposed to basically be inside your computer, you know, hooking up your hard drive and your components to transfer data more efficiently within your machine itself. Now, the more recent research suggests that they intended to be thing for used for things that you

plug in peripherals that you plug into your computer as well. UM, So in a way, if if it were sticking to what's inside your computer, UM, that would make more sense that it would be a technology to use fiber optics to move info around inside your machine or inside peripherals just that much more quickly, and then using USB on

the external to transfer information between devices. Now you know, if they really are serious about using it to hook peripherals to your computer, then yes, I don't see how it could not be considered a competitor to USB three. Um. You know, if the USB three uh contingent believes that Intel is doing this in an anti competitive way, I

would expect to see this hit the streets and the courtroom. Um. You know, you'll you'll hear about the court cases because you know that happens a little bit in between technology companies when one feels slided by another. But yeah, I would imagine that really there's room for both. Uh. There may be applications for which light peak is particularly well suited. Um, you know, and it may be particularly more expensive because it relies on fiber optic technology rather than good old copper. Yeah,

I UM, I know. I would imagine things like, let's say I can't imagine you're needing a light peak connection for your keyboard or for your mouths. Well, everybody, everybody that's in quotes, everybody's using the wireless mice and keyboards anyway, right through Bluetooth, right, Yeah, no, not really, but yeah, you don't really, that's that's overkill for something like that, or or even for gaming devices where you really don't

want where you really want a fast connection. You're you're concerned about things like latency between your your computer and your keyboard. So yeah, still, even then, I can't imagine that that a USB, even a USB two device would be useful for that because it to be because a game pad, even though you do want to cut down on on latency, there's not a whole lot of data being pushed through. And if there isn't a lot of data,

it's going through very very fast. I mean it's you know, we're talking about top speeds of four megabits per secon for USB two point oh and four point eight gigabits per second for USB three point out. That's that's definitely

overkill for those kind of devices. But for the other thing, applications like to replace the Ethernet port, or to replace HDM my ports, or to create a fast connection between your computer and an external hard drive so you can back up really really quickly, you know, in a few seconds as opposed to you know, an hour or two, depending on what kind of device you're using and what kind of how much data you're you're shipping around. Then

totally makes sense. And we also should remember that USB three point oh USB in general has a limitation on how long the cable can be, which is around five meters, which is actually pretty pretty long. Um, But the light peak cable, it's limitations a hundred meters when you start.

When when Intel starts mentioning things like that, like the fact that light peak cables could be up to a hundred meters long without any loss in performance, you have to come to the conclusion, Asian that this is not intended solely as an internalized component, because why would you need a hundred meter cable inside your computer? That I can't imagine an application for which that would be really really useful, But I'm sure there's somebody out there going,

really that would be great. Finally, I could build my computer the size of the Graysler building. Um. The Chrysler building is slightly longer or slightly taller. Yes, but you put the computer part in the middle, silly, any of the peripherals at the top of the bottom. I thought

this through. Okay, Okay, so anyway, the Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how this pans out, whether USB three point or like peak goes forward, whether Intel starts to produce more chip sets that actually that actually support USB three point oh, so that we start seeing more of those computers on the market. Um, Like I said, there are some motherboards out there that have USB three point chips. You can actually go out and buy a

USB three card and install it on your computer. Um. Although a lot of people think, well, what's the point of that. I mean, the reason why people like USB a lot is that it's convenient. And part of that convenience is that it's pre installed on your computer. You don't have to go and open your computer up and put in a chip. And of course a lot of us are using laptops that you may not be able to install another card in your laptop, depending on how

it was manufactured and how tech savvy you are. Yeah, well, I mean, like my netbook, I can't do it. You know, you know, if the netbook came with USB three, that'd be awesome, but there's I'm never gonna get USB three on that netbook. I would have to buy a new one that would have that built into it from the start. So, uh, I'm I'm curious to see how this plays out, especially again with the whole computer security angle. Backing up the computer and at just a fraction of speed is really

appealing to me. Or the idea of buying a new MP three player and moving my five thousand plus song list onto it in just a second or two is that's also very appealing to me, so you can just immediately go and listen to your music. So we'll have to keep an eye on this see how it plays out, whether or not whether or not it really they really do work in tandem, or if light Peak will push USB three out of the way before it even gets a chance to get started. Well, that wraps up this

discussion on USB and light Peak. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm gonna go get some coffee right there. If you wanna let us know what you think about the debate, send us a message on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled there is tech Stuff H s W. Or you can shoot us an email That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuffworks dot com.

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