NEC manages 16Gbps, tries to put a dimmer on Light Peak (updated)

If you didn’t know it, there’s a brewing interface war between the effortlessly backwards compatible USB 3.0 and the decidedly fresh break offered by Light Peak. Most people are fans of new stuff that works with their old stuff, but so too do people like stuff that’s really fast, and USB 3.0′s 5Gbps just can’t match Light Peak’s 10Gbps. Or can it? NEC says it can, indicating that its USB 3.0 NEC has demonstrated a new chipset managing a whopping 16Gbps (2GB per second) over a single cable, finding a way to overcome that standard’s signal interference problems to more than triple the USB 3.0′s held ceiling. It remains to be seen whether NEC’s technique will be integrated into the still young 3.0 spec, but that would certainly be the logical thing to do.

Update: TheLostSwede commented to point us to an English version of the press release that, in Japanese form, seems to have led to the Electronista story we used as a source. Apparently something previously got lost in translation as the release actually talks about a wholly new inter-chip serial interface offering 16Gbps speeds, not an extension to USB 3.0. This could provide the system internals to shovel bits to whatever new external interface reigns supreme.

NEC manages 16Gbps, tries to put a dimmer on Light Peak (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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