Quote
Naturally, we gave Sony a ring to discuss the company’s new high-speed optical interconnect. Sony was very careful with its terminology during the conversation, calling the VAIO Z’s super-fast connector a “Power Media Dock Port,” not “USB,” that just happens to work with USB 2.0 and 3.0 devices without an adapter. Sony told us that its choice of port designs was purposely done to maintain compatibility with as many USB devices as possible — “we didn’t want customers to be at a disadvantage,” Sony stressed. To avoid any kind of Thunderbolt fragmentation, we were assured that the Power Media Dock would be on the only device capable of working with Sony’s proprietary optical connection — it will never work with Thunderbolt accessories. In fact, Sony sees its implementation as something entirely different than Thunderbolt due to the latter’s copper underpinnings and reliance on Mini DisplayPort. For now, anyway, Sony tells us that it has no plans for additional Light Peak-based peripherals for the VAIO Z. Fortunately, the Power Media Dock already features 1GB of AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics, a Blu-ray Disc (or DVD SuperMulti) drive; and HDMI, VGA, 1x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, and gigabit Ethernet ports. Unfortunately, Sony was not prepared to discuss the technical details of its interconnect, so we’re still not sure if it’s 10Gbps, or something closer to the 100Gbps made possible by Sony’s optical implementation.
