Intel Light Peak optical interconnect is blisteringly fast

Speeds up to 10Gbps over huge distances.

Though you'd never guess from the oddly named Light Peak announcement, it's not an information-deprived sneaky look at something but rather a brand-new optical technology that aims to provide a huge amount of bandwidth.

It uses a special controller much the same as the USB standard, and even the connector looks quite similar, but the performance hits 10Gbps sustained over a 100m distance.

Most interesting of all is that it's a standard for mobile devices more than anything, giving ultrafast bandwidth to perform all the tasks future devices might want to support - from external displays, media streaming and ultrafast data syncing.

It'll be good to have a standard fast connector to use, but sadly Light Peak is sometime off in the distance, running only in prototype stages for now and not being anywhere near small enough to fit inside a mobile device.

Still, there's some exciting ideas for its use, so head to engadget for a little more on Light Peak.