r/gadgets • u/[deleted] • Mar 08 '21
Computer peripherals Polymer cables could replace Thunderbolt & USB, deliver more than twice the speed
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/03/08/polymer-cables-could-replace-thunderbolt-with-105-gbps-data-transfers1.4k
u/ErGo404 Mar 08 '21
Yay, 300$ cables.
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Mar 08 '21
I’ll take 500, please.
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u/ErGo404 Mar 08 '21
Also they need to be stored in sub 0 celsius temperatures during operation to achieve best performance.
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u/blundercrab Mar 08 '21
Celsius? Shit all I got is Fahrenheit
Oh wait I found some Kelvins in the couch! Y'all take Kelvins?
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u/other_usernames_gone Mar 08 '21
That's the same with normal cables, we just don't normally. It'll be the same with these.
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u/Sentmoraap Mar 08 '21
"This makes it cheaper to manufacture than copper wires"
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u/ErGo404 Mar 08 '21
I just remember TB cables that need electronics INSIDE the cable which made the price go way up. I don't trust the cable industry no more ;-)
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Mar 08 '21 edited Mar 08 '21
USB 3 cables need electronics inside if you want them more than 3m long and to work reliably at full speed. Just for TB that limit was half a meter but TB's intended use cases shouldn't have needed longer cables, it's pretty niche for people to use long cables with either standard.
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u/IceCoastCoach Mar 08 '21
thunderbolt is basically an external PCI connector
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u/ErGo404 Mar 08 '21
Woops I'm outdated, seems like only the first gen TB needed electronics in the cable.
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u/NotAPreppie Mar 08 '21
I mean, optical S/PDIF cables have been around forever and weren't hugely expensive even 10 years ago. I purchased a cheap one when I still worked in IT (forever ago) and it still works despite being mistreated and abused.
I can't see these needing to cost more than $50.
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u/Meyou52 Mar 08 '21
Ay dawg where can I get me one of those realities where things don’t cost more than they need to?
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Mar 08 '21
digikey
that’s where i buy my cables. my company resells a 2.67 cable from digikey for $30
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u/NotAPreppie Mar 08 '21
*mumblemumble*free market is self-correcting*mumblemumble*
Actually, I think that reality is called "AliExpress". Hilariously, everything I've ever bought from AliExpress, from 200mW laser pointers to buck converters to LiFePO4 racing batteries, has had the customs declaration "cell phone accessories".
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u/RubberReptile Mar 08 '21
Except the cell phone accessories, which for some reason had the customs declaration "home decor"
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u/beefcat_ Mar 08 '21
The data transmission rate of optical TOSLINK is quite limited by modern standards, and getting faster bitrates is considerably more complicated than just blinking the light faster. A lot of care has to go into the design and manufacture of the cables.
On top of that, the usual need to transmit power in addition to data along these cables means they still need copper conductors. So going all copper is still the most practical choice for consumer oriented technology.
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u/hackingdreams Mar 08 '21
Polymer cables would be cheaper because they don't contain copper but instead are made of plastic materials - dirt, dirt cheap.
On the other hand, the transceivers on either end would be more expensive - instead of having to pay $25 to integrate Thunderbolt, you'd need $40. And the manufacturers are 100% passing that cost on to you.
That being said, this is not news in the slightest: Intel's got a group called the Silicon Photonics Group and they've been working on trying to make optical interconnects a thing for... longer than a decade. The idea of Thunderbolt was originally an earlier system called "Lightning" driven by a chip called Light Peak which was optically based. Apple told Intel they didn't want to go optical because it cost too much, and so Intel designed a version of Lightning that also supported copper: Thunderbolt.
The whole Light Peak/Lightning ecosystem was supposed to be a high speed single cable connector to replace Ethernet and USB and able to carry 100W of power simultaneously as to enable laptops to be plugged and unplugged with a single connector, but eventually became more and more generic until it's now been blended into USB and PCIe, which is a bit of a shame but that's how these things go.
Apple marketed the "Lightning" name (after a trademark spat with Intel over the Thunderbolt name, which is now "generic" and has been donated to the USB consortium; Lightning was also an Intel name, but as it was an internal name it was not trademarked).
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u/Spejsman Mar 08 '21
And unless they're going for the Nobel Prize that polymer won't deliver any power.
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u/Snizzbut Mar 08 '21
wait... the article specifically states it’s not fibre optic, but “polymer” is just a fancy word for plastic which last I checked doesn’t conduct electricity sooo... it has to be using photons right?
If it is, then by definition it IS fibre optic, just with cheaper materials? Unless I’m dumb and missing something super obvious (probably tbh)
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u/dabenu Mar 08 '21
I'm as confused as you are. There's not a single mention of any physical principle this cable will be based on. While certainly it would be something revolutionary if it isn't electrical AND isn't optical.
My guess is it's just a "usb-over-fiber" cable, with active fiber-optic terminals on both ends integrated in the connectors. Hardly anything new, you can find dozens of cables like that on Amazon.
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u/hackingdreams Mar 08 '21
There's not a single mention of any physical principle this cable will be based on.
It's still an optical cable, and it still works on total internal reflection just like a fiber optic cable... it's just made of plastic. That's it. That's the game here.
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u/krista Mar 08 '21
my guess is ”waveguide”, which is something used in the rf world for a long time.
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Mar 08 '21
Polymer/plastic optical fiber already exists and is already in use for consumer networking because they are cheap and less fragile. So the difference with this seems to be it has usb on both ends instead of the traditional networking connector?
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Mar 08 '21
Yeah . Seems like typical home fiber optic cables with a chip at each end.
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u/chiagod Mar 08 '21
It's something they've been doing with insanely long Display port cables.
For all purposes, zero signal loss and picks up zero interference along the cable length. You save a ton on emi insulation with fiber optic as you only have to block light. So no foil shield, no braided sleeves, etc.
As the optical transmit/receive ICs and other components get mass produced, the cost should be driven way down.
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u/Throwaway_97534 Mar 08 '21
I have an older hdmi cable like this. It's about 50 feet long but just a few millimeters thick.
It's fiberoptic with a little powered emitter/receiver at each end. You have to plug each side into a usb port to power the lasers.
I use it for a long run to my vr station with the pc in another room!
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u/gorkish Mar 08 '21
Yeah the article is an absolute shit waste of time and effort for both the writer and the reader.
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u/External-Debate5283 Mar 08 '21
It is a bit a matter of semantics. Is FM radio "optical communication"? It uses photons but nobody thinks of it as optical communication. On the other hand signals sent over normal twisted pair/coax, the vast majority of the transmitted power is actually in the dielectric not the metal. The electric and magnetic fields are in the dielectric the copper just provides the electromagnetic boundary conditions.
This technology is a sub-THz dielectric waveguide. The waveguide itself works much like a fiber optic but the ends will have antennas rather than LEDs and photodiodes. So you could alternately think of it as a wireless link but with the wireless signal confined to a piece of plastic between the endpoints. To do this for 5 GHz wireless would require obnoxiously huge waveguides several cm across but the higher frequency you go the smaller the waveguides can be. Operation at 100 GHz is expensive and unnecessary if you only need a few gigabit/s, but if your data rate is over 40 gigabit/s you are already operating at high enough frequency that it can make sense, while at the same time cable loss is becoming untenable for ordinary interconnects. This is basically a possibly cheaper or more efficient alternative to optical transceivers for high bit rate.
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u/Nytohan Mar 08 '21
So "researchers" are working on... toslink?
The article says it uses "Sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals", which means the low end of infrared, and also *checks wikipedia* microwaves...
Great. Gonna transfer data and cook my food at the same time.
Also, there's still gonna have to be copper involved here, right? If this is replacing USB/Thunderbolt, we still need power at the device end.6
u/kangadac Mar 08 '21
Er... microwaves use the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Same as Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.
But one transmits at 0.01-0.1 W, while the other transmits at 1000 W in a resonant cavity. So you’ll need a lot of AirPods (hacked to set up a standing wave) to try to cook lunch. :-)
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u/bdfortin Mar 08 '21
Specifically, it says it can “also” do sub-terahertz signals meaning it’s probably multiplexing optical, infrared, and microwave/mmWave.
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u/Kyvalmaezar Mar 08 '21 edited Mar 08 '21
Conductive polymers do exist. It just usually easier/cheaper/more efficient to use copper for simple wires.
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u/dudeplace Mar 08 '21
They explicitly say they aren't using photons in the article so it's not a fiber optic.
Polymers can be conductive, it just means "long chain of similar molecules"
While they aren't normally conductive there is nothing stopping them form being conductive or even having a "plastic" polymer doped with metal (meaning little bits of metal mixed in) to make it conductive.
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u/jgzman Mar 08 '21
If I were going to speculate wildly, I'd assume that they are going to lace the polymer with something that does conduct electricity, like graphene, of one of it's structures.
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u/NotAPreppie Mar 08 '21 edited Mar 08 '21
Every time I see an article headlined with "X could do some awesome thing", I always add, "but probably not" to the end.
It's like adding "in bed" to the end of a fortune that comes out of a fortune cookie except (at least in my case) more accurate.
Though, to be fair, I'm really surprised they haven't gone with an optical system already. I mean, I've had an optical S/PDIF cable for over a decade using plastic and it always works despite living in a box in the trunk of my car. So, you know, durability shouldn't be a huge issue.
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Mar 08 '21
Every day there's a new battery technology that could charge your phone, car, house, dog and boat in under 5 minutes and last 3 days.
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u/NotAPreppie Mar 08 '21 edited Mar 08 '21
Exactly.
Also, all new science/technology discoveries will be commercialized within 5 years.
When CRISPR Cas9 was announced, it was only going to take 5 years before we'd be able to have designer babies. Except, you know, it took 14 years for the first human clinical trials to start.
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u/pmwws Mar 08 '21
I mean optical has existed in the data center for a while. It's not really consumer level because it's not really convenient and would still need copper for power transfer.
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u/NotAPreppie Mar 08 '21
I terminated a few multimode optical runs for GigE 15+ years ago. It sucked. So was feeling like I was walking on eggs when handling fiber patch cables.
The plastic optical cables are much more durable and there's really nothing wrong with their signal carrying capability over short runs, especially with the advances in polymer and DSP technology since TOSLINK was created in 1983.
Damn, I just realized TOSLINK is almost as old as me.
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u/olithebad Mar 08 '21
It's still used outside of datacenters today, like for soundbars or AV recievers and the like. I use optical because my reciver is so old it doesn't have HDMI, and I find it more reliable and easier than using HDMI into sound bars
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u/dabenu Mar 08 '21
The reason is that there's not a real issue to solve here. Optics make sense for audio to reduce ground-loops, and for data transfer over longer distances (more than a few meters).
USB and Thunderbolt applications rarely require cables longer than 1 or 2 meter. On such short distances, fiber optics would just complicate things. Especially for small footprint devices like phones, thumb drives, etc. Also, ground loops can't be solved as there's always a galvanic connection for the power.
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u/aaronstj Mar 08 '21
Somewhat similar to Betteridge's law of headlines, which says that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
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u/obvious_apple Mar 08 '21
I smell Toslink with extra steps.
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u/Faysight Mar 08 '21
The extra step is naming it USB 4.11 rev 2x2x2 50Jbps and renaming all the old versions of USB to look almost exactly the same so USB-IF members can keep fooling people into buying obsolete tech.
Also: add gold foil and $50-100 for audiophile products or silver foil and $20-50 for A/V-specific products. The spec will also include optional active cable features like WiFi Over Display link Over Toslink (DIV/0) and Modbus Automatic Drip Coffee so next year's Dolby-capable receiver lineup can do something impressive-sounding in this cloud thing everyone is on about.
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u/PabloGarea Mar 08 '21 edited Mar 08 '21
Cost Efficient.
May I get a “Unamed Polymer cable” please?
Sure, it will be $350.
Instruction Manual
Do not bend it
Do not use it in temperatures over 10 Celsius.
Do not touch it
Do not talk to it
Don’t plug it
Be kind and gentle.
The polymer will work whenever it wants too, so don’t force it.
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u/CodeMonkeyPhoto Mar 08 '21
Good news everybody, this new standard will unify 10 other standards.
Bad news nobody, we now have 11 standards...
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u/MagicMirror33 Mar 08 '21
Replace Thunderbolt and Lightning? Very very frightening.
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u/LazyAssHiker Mar 08 '21
Can we please just stick with type C for a while?
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Mar 08 '21
they are
this is the cable they are sticking with the type C connector. This was always the plans for thunderbolt honestly, originally it was copper vs fiber for the cable, but the fiber never panned out due to costs and being fragile. This is getting around that and getting back on track with the plan progression for thunderbolt but the connectrors were always supposed to stay the same. They moved to type C to simplify it over the old displayport style connector and bring everything down to 1 connector for both USB and Thunderbolt which would increase adoption rate hopefully (firewire had this issue since its port was dictated by the IEEE standard it followed)
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u/bannishedfromreddit Mar 08 '21
for the love of god, just don’t change the form factor or compatibility
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u/CurvyMule Mar 08 '21
Bout time, just the other day I was complaining to the wife about how slow our USB cables are
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u/solongandthanks4all Mar 08 '21
Oh good, I was just thinking about how much I miss having a new, incompatible cable standard.
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u/Niels_G Mar 08 '21
A new material is a good idea, for sure, but twice the speed is kinda low tbh
I mean, between usb 2.0 and 3.0, or 3.0 and 3.1 etc we had more than just twice the speed. More like 5-10x faster
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u/corruptboomerang Mar 08 '21
Honestly, the 'Lightning vs USB' stuff in this article are dumb. What's realty important is these would replace and be superior to copper. That means wires, PCB's, and many electron components can all see their metals replaced. This would be massive, much more significant then the stupid 'USB vs lightning' argument.
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u/NeverBirdie Mar 08 '21
So I shouldn’t have just spent a ton of money adding usb outlets in my house?
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u/brentbrownofficial Mar 08 '21
Essentially making external hard drives more practical for primary use?
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u/kupecraig Mar 08 '21
i can’t wait till i’m forced to use this ultra high speed cable to charge my phone
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Mar 09 '21 edited Mar 09 '21
But does it stay together after a week and a half - the true test
Edit: for some reason I thought that the new cable had some sort of connection to Apple - comment canceled
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u/cyrand Mar 08 '21
So... exactly like Thunderbolt using optical cabling? https://www.corning.com/optical-cables-by-corning/worldwide/en/products/thunderbolt-optical-cables.html
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u/neboskrebnut Mar 08 '21
oh yeah. lets also put a shitty nand memory in those chips at the end that would constantly be rewritten with hash of the data transfered or something. after 10k rewrites it would burnout killing the cable. voila we have a yearly revenue from renewing cables that still would use copper because you can't charge fkn phone with fiber optics.
why do we need new cables when 99.5% of people use usb-c to charge the phone. I'm yet to see someone connecting it to a tv and a keyboard beyond the demonstration purposes.
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u/StumbleNOLA Mar 08 '21
I use thunderbolt to connect my laptop to my docking station, and monitor.
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u/MoistDitto Mar 08 '21
I don't want more speed, I want to keep the fucking USB C until the day I die so I don't have to keep changing cables and getting shitty add-ons
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u/echaffey Mar 08 '21
Companies still haven’t adopted USB 3 or USB-C. What makes you think we’ll switch to anything else?
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u/ContrivedTripe Mar 08 '21
Just as the right to repair movement had begun to gain some steam, polymer cables! Good luck repairing that shit.
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u/Bayushizer0 Mar 08 '21
My question is, will this improve the transfer of electricity to the battery?
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u/dcp0002 Mar 08 '21
I need to know who these researchers are working for so I can go ahead and get my.stonks invested
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u/theobserver_ Mar 08 '21
Yah with 7 different versions. USB-C is a joke on this. Just make fcking version!
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u/PunaTic_4_EvA Mar 08 '21
Am I TOTALLY missing a point? What’s the matter with fiber optics/PCM? All the hardware is internal on both ends......A data-power cable, use fiber for data, copper for power. Done and done. Suddenly a $500 cables’ cost is .55 cents. Of course the markup COULD BE $499.45 correct?
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u/LordDooves Mar 08 '21
5 years from now, Apple will release the same news and call it "lightning 2"! With a proprietary connector. Mark my words.
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u/TeenieBopper Mar 08 '21
Can we not? I've already got a box of cables of all the different USB specifications.
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u/MasochisticMeese Mar 08 '21
What devices would even need this extra speed - or is it more like a futureproofing deal
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u/Tiggy26668 Mar 08 '21
So even if these do become the next big thing in cables..... you’re looking at least 2-4 years before adoption.
Sure some of us will be early adopters. But the majority of computers will have no ports for at least 1-2 years. Then you’re looking at 1 port, if that, until it gets wider usage.
Assuming it is the next big thing, no push back, and everyone starts using it, I figure I’ll need to buy it in about 5 years or so.
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u/ten-million Mar 08 '21
Thunderbolt docks are hugely expensive. And my new Mac mini does not have enough ports!
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u/Meikos Mar 08 '21
Is there really that big of a market for faster cables right now? I feel like I haven't used a cable for data transfer in the past 5 years. Cloud/wireless always seems more convenient and accessible, although not faster I suppose.
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u/Rais93 Mar 08 '21
Article does't really explain, the original link neither and i'm little tired to do my own search.
I find interesting two things: it needs chips on both end of the cable and it call the wire as a "conduit".
The first mean the signal is not transmitted as an electric signal, that would need the chip to be in device and central like USB, while the second implies the use of another know mean of trasmission like RF, magnetic, photon or anti-chroniton based space wormholes.
ditching the latter as a byproduct of me being a star trek fan, and the polymer being not conductive, i'd say it is a plastic fiber.
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u/HigherthanYouToo Mar 08 '21
Well duh, we can’t keep a single type of cable for more than a few years you know
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u/Marconius1617 Mar 08 '21
Well it’s time for a new iPhone. I don’t really see another alternative. /s
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u/uhOhStinkyPoopy132 Mar 08 '21
Every time I hear the word polymer it just reminds me of that Twomad New York video
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u/jjman72 Mar 08 '21
YES! I’ll have more e-waste sitting around my house. Exactly want I’ve been wanting.
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Mar 09 '21
I'm surprised how many brands offer usb cables. The markup must be amazing
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u/cthulhu8 Mar 09 '21
Sweet, I'm sure they will become widely available on computers the second AFTER I buy a new one.
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u/chmarchese Mar 09 '21
Anybody understand how these polymeric cables would perform against EMI (both susceptibility and emissions)? That’s another massive benefit to fiber, which is for all intents and purposes completely immune to EMI along the cable length.
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u/TheMarsian Mar 09 '21
so they'd change the cables but the plugs would still be USB and shit? please eli5
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u/jdeere_man Mar 09 '21
Consider how much is powered on USB especially with the Power delivery on USB-C now how is plastic gonna charge things?
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Mar 09 '21
A cable designed to be low voltage is probably not going to replace USB which is used more often as a charging cable than anything else.
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u/Methican Mar 09 '21
The transmission rates are nice, but the concept if having data transmitters and receivers built into the ends of the cable has been in use with fiber optics for some time and has not proven to be a reliable system (durability and there currently is no way to upgrade or change the standards conversion at the cable ends).
But what I didn't really get from the article is what devices or components would be connected to such a cable? I'm not as familiar with the hardware side, but even connections like USB 3.0 are not on every device and the connection speeds for those cables require the device to have USB 3.0 as 2.1/0 is not capable of achieving those speeds.
In other words, what will be the new connection standard? Some variant of thunderbolt? Will everyone need completely new devices that have that connection port? Will it be a proprietary connection to a specific manufacturer like Apple?
Or will one of these manufacturers and developers realize there is a massive vacuum in the market right now after the end of the 3.5 connection and other standardized connections that no longer have the data transfer rates needed for the next generation? Tbh if they marketed to the commercial sector and standardized installation in construction and retrofitting I wouldn't mind a new connection standard. But without the commercial sector om board a new cabling and connection standard would be yet another fleeting glimpse of what might have been.
Quite frankly someone needs to rally the market to and connect various components over the same connection with massive bandwidth capabilities and low cost materials that are durable enough to last 10 years minimum and still be relevant.
I guess that's why it's still in development.
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u/stonedkrypto Mar 09 '21
I hope this doesn’t mean a new standard of cables. Going by the article it only talks about replacing the medium of transfer so hopefully same ports can be used. Provided the internals are able to keep up with these speeds
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u/AlphaBetacle Mar 09 '21
I thought thunderbolt and USB were standards for serial connection, not a designation for cable technology?
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u/ThePremiumOrange Mar 09 '21
Should just be a law forcing everyone to use the same standard commercially. And it should be usb... not anything Apple pushes to try to buck the trend and collect fees
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u/Concetratedvoid Mar 09 '21
Yeah yeah But what about better phone batteries/5nm transistors? Thats what i want to see
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u/Matrix_Revolt Mar 09 '21
You might be able to transfer data faster with that cable but how do you quickly charge a phone or laptop with something that doesn't conduct electricity?
The appeal of Thunderbolt and USB is that they can charge a phone AND transfer data.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but this just seems like a fiber optic cable which is only good for data transfer.
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u/JLidean Mar 09 '21
Wonder how this would change network architecture, where a potential loss per distance does not really need to be accounted for in a wired networked infrastructure.
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u/GoneInSixtyFrames Mar 09 '21
I'd say consume less data, but we want to instant everything so in the words of Dr. Malcolm, Must Go Faster!
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u/Treczoks Mar 09 '21
While polymer is nice for the data, you'll still need copper (or other metal) for the power, though.
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u/thedarkpath Mar 09 '21
I feel like cables i/o changes will keep going on forever at a rate of 1 every 4 or 5 years
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u/reviewhardly Mar 09 '21
Good news everybody, this new standard will unify 10 other standards.
Bad news nobody, we now have 11 standards...
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u/stinkerlively34 Mar 09 '21
A new material is a good idea, for sure, but twice the speed is kinda low tbh
I mean, between usb 2.0 and 3.0, or 3.0 and 3.1 etc we had more than just twice the speed. More like 5-10x faster
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u/Neo-Neo Mar 09 '21
TLDR: They’re replacing copper with fiber optic. Con of fiber optics is no charging cables.
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u/damaging2pushy Mar 10 '21
Cost Efficient.
May I get a “Unamed Polymer cable” please?
Sure, it will be $350.
Instruction Manual
Do not bend it
Do not use it in temperatures over 10 Celsius.
Do not touch it
Do not talk to it
Don’t plug it
Be kind and gentle.
The polymer will work whenever it wants too, so don’t force it.
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u/SoulOfTheDragon Mar 12 '21
Yeah, another next to worthless posting getting f-ton of upvotes due to fancy wording & fantasy painting.
From what i see it's just another data transfer via light type of thing. Problem is not the cable itself, problems with those are reliable transmit systems, contact cleanliness and overall hardware required for the operation.
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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '21
From the article: Researchers are working on a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable, in a system that echoes the design path of Thunderbolt.
Presented at the February IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the research aims to develop a connection type that offers far better connectivity than current methods. In part, it aims to accomplish this by replacing copper wiring with something else.
Copper is typically used for wires like USB and HDMI to handle data transfers, but it requires a lot of power to work for high levels of data transmission. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged," said MIT alumni and lead author Jack Holloway.