USB and Light Peak to be deadly rivals

No competition from AMD so Intel fights itself
Probably the biggest, most influential story you will read this month is that Apple has signed up for Light Peak. At first sight you might think that it's nothing special but this news is something that has ramifications for the whole industry for years to come.

Light Peak is the new Intel standard designed to compete with USB3. Which is also an Intel standard. The bizarre twist is that Intel is not expected to release any USB3-capable chipsets until well after it has Light Peak-capable chips on the market. Light Peak is an optical cable interface designed to connect devices in a peripheral bus. The technology has a high bandwidth at 10 Gbit/s, with the potential to scale to 100 Gbit/s by 2020.
Currently in development, Light Peak is being developed as a single universal replacement for current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI, in an attempt to reduce the proliferation of ports on contemporary computers. Bus systems such as USB were developed for the same purpose, and successfully replaced a number of older technologies. However, increasing bandwidth demands have led to higher performance standards like eSATA and DisplayPort that cannot connect to USB and similar peripherals. Light Peak provides a high enough bandwidth to drive these over a single type of interface, and often on a single daisy chained cable.
Independent manufacturers of USB3 devices and chips will be worried that this could mean the end of Intel support for USB3. After all, there isn't much reason for Intel to support both standards.

Thankfully for the independents, history points to a safe ride. When Apple released the all-USB iMac, there wasn't a single PC that followed suit for years. Even if Intel decides to back Light Peak at the expense of USB3, things won't change quickly.

Just as with the iMac switch to USB, there is simply far too much industry momentum for a quick and easy change to Light Peak. Especially at the low end of the market. Intel will know this. Apple will know this.

The big question that will be keeping analysts, investors and product designers busy for years is not whether Light Peak will cause USB3 to slowly fade into the background. That will be easy to spot if it happens. The thing that will leave them with sleepless nights is whether Light Peak is destined for the big time or will it become another technologically superior also-ran like Firewire?

History
Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology.
Intel has designed a prototype PCI Express card for desktop PCs as an add-on. This would mean many people wouldn't need to buy a new motherboard for the new cable type. The card has two optical buses powering 4 ports. On many machines, however, such a card would not be able achieve the full 40Gbit/s bandwidth of four Light Peak ports, as that bit rate would require a 16x PCIe slot (1xPCIe is 4Gbit/s) for optimal performance, and most machines only have one 16x slot, usually occupied by a video card.
On May 4, 2010, in Brussels, Intel demonstrated a laptop with a Light Peak connector (indicating that the technology had become small enough to fit inside such a device) and had the laptop send 2 distinct simultaneous HD video streams down the connection (indicating that at least some fraction of the software/firmware stacks and protocols are now functional). At the same demonstration, Intel maintained that it expected hardware manufacturing to begin around the end of 2010.
In September 2010, some early commercial prototypes from manufacturers were demonstrated at Intel Developer Forum 2010.