Here’s what I considered the possibilities for what RED is all about:

1) It’s a total scam, just for fun. (unlikely)

2) They’re serious, but will miss their goal time.

3) They’re serious, but will under-deliver.

4) They’re doing this in the hopes of being bought out dotcom-style.

One need only pause for a second to get a sense of the scale of their problem. At 4k, 12bit, 4:4:4, 60p, your data rate is in excess of 2gigabytes (BYTES!) per second. A duallink, 4gig fiberchannel connection tops out around 1gigabyte/sec. The fastest RAID array I saw at the show, which had 42 drives in it, could sustain 750 megabytes/sec.

So, they’d need an interface that could push that much, and an array that could write that much. Even Infiniband can’t do it in a single link connection (I don’t know if infiniband does dual link).

They also claim that the sensor will be upgradable to higher resolutions in the future. That would imply that the backplane and everything else internally can handle even HIGHER datarates. I’m just not convinced – though I always leave open the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong…