Nov 4, 2010 10:16 GMT  ·  By

Intel has been teasing us with its Light Peak technology for what seems like forever, but, according to some rumors, Light Peak is now on track to appear in products sometime during the first half of 2011, making life a little bit harder for SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

This latest report comes thanks to Cnet that cites an “industry source familiar with the progress of the technology,” Intel's Light Peak standard being able to deliver up to 10 Gbit/s transfer rates, with the potential to grow to 100 Gbit/s by 2020.

And since this impressive transfer rate is possible of being achieved in both directions simultaneously, Light Peak should be able to replace a wide range of current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI, in an attempt to reduce port proliferation on present day computers.

Although we are still pretty far away from that goal, Intel has already showcased a bunch of prototypes to demo the power of this new high-speed interconnect standard, companies like Samsung, LaCie AND Enermax also showing working prototypes of Light Peak enabled devices during Fall IDF 2010.

Although the sources cited by Cnet did not state the which manufacturers are preparing Light Peak solutions for 2011, it's pretty safe to assume that at least a part of the companies that showcased such products during IDF will have commercially ready products by then.

This latest news come just a few days after we reported on a rumor that stated Intel is working on the Chief River notebook platform that will come with native support for the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard, so it's pretty unclear how will Intel market these two different high bandwidth technologies when both of them will become available.

One solution would be for Light Peak to be marketed as a high-connectivity port for monitors, high-end data storage and the like while USB 3.0 could cater to entry level external drives, computer input devices and other peripherals of this sort (since a wide selection of USB devices is already available).