Displayport V1.2 To Take Giant Leap Over HDMI

An anonymous reader writes "With HDMI becoming increasingly common, Displayport has been slow to emerge as a widely used connection interface, but a plethora of new features in the new v1.2 standard could see that change. As well as doubling the data rate of the existing v1.1a standard to 21.6 Gbps, the update allows for multiple monitors to be connected to a single Displayport connector and adds support for transporting USB data at up to 720Mbps, enabling embedded webcams, speakers and USB hubs over a single cable. Ethernet data is also supported. The improved data rate will allow for richer, larger and higher resolution displays, and the new version is also backward compatible with the current display technology, so all the ports, cables and devices will be interchangeable, although they will revert to the lowest common denominator."

Comments

Light Peak?

[hart]

I wonder how long it will last as the "standard" with Light Peak allegedly only a year away? Source: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm

HDMI is not fine though

[Sycraft-fu]

One of the big ones, a reason that Display Port was developed to begin with, is HDMI needs additional chips/control circuits on the transmitting and receiving end to deal with encoding and decoding. Display Port is directly compatible with the display panels themselves and as such needs less hardware. It can be used internally in a laptop as the bus to the integrated display, and as output to another display. All in all it equals the ability to make smaller and slimmer displays because there's less in them.

Another somewhat related is Display Port doesn't cost any royalties. HDMI does. Added together it can lead to reduced costs. Less stuff in the display and less licensing fees equals less cost.

The bandwidth thing is a potential issue too. Even HDMI 1.4 doesn't have near as high a bandwidth (1.4 is actually the same bandwidth as 1.3). Now it doesn't matter a whole lot at the moment, but could in a few years. If we see more high refresh displays, which are useful for 3D and also look nicer, as well as higher resolutions we are going to hit in to bandwidth limits. Would be good to have a connector that is going to scale up to those.

can somebody explain to me...

[pointbeing]

...why we don't just do all this crap over an optical link?

Migration path?

[TheRaven64]

Okay, I have a new rule: You're not allowed to define a new standard until after you've thought about how people will migrate to it from their existing stuff.

Once upon a time, we had VGA. This was a pretty simple analogue signal, which was great for driving a CRT. At high resolutions it got a bit blurry though and it was a bit silly to convert a digital signal to analogue and back for displaying on a TFT. So then we had DVI. The DVI connector incorporated the VGA signal as well as a new, digital, one. If you got a new display that supported DVI then you could connect it to your old computer with a very cheap (i.e. containing no electronics) adaptor. Then, when you got a new video card that supported DVI, you just threw away the adaptor and used the digital signal.

After a while, most things used the digital signal, so you started getting DVI-D devices, where the analogue pins weren't connected to anything. Then came HDMI, which used exactly the same signal as DVI-D. You could, once again, connect HDMI devices to DVI-D devices with a trivial adaptor. Because these adaptors are cheap, a few months after they're introduced you can usually find someone who has one if you need one and forget yours.

But now we have DisplayPort. It is digital, but it uses a completely different kind of signal to HDMI / DVI-D. If you want to connect a DisplayPort device to something that only supports VGA or HDMI then you need an expensive adaptor that decodes a frame in one format into a buffer then reencodes it in the other format.

So the migration path from DVI to DisplayPort is for graphics cards to be able to produce both kinds of signal and for monitors to be able to accept both kind. This immediately eliminates two of the big advantages of DisplayPort: no license fees and simpler electronics. Add to that the fact that you have three kinds of connector for DisplayPort (DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort and Micro DisplayPort), so you probably need an adaptor anyway, just to plug one DisplayPort device into another, and it's easier to just use HDMI.

This is a shame, because DisplayPort is a much better spec than HDMI.

Re:no no no no no!

[snowraver1]

Yeah, but my TV I spent $2000 on 7 months ago doesn't have a displayport. Neither does my xbox or media pc. I only have one TV in my man-cave so I don't care about daisy chaining. Don't care about touch screen as I sit on the couch. Display port is fine for computers, and I expect my computer to go out of date, but HDMI is fine for TV.

If you want to address the cabling mess, start with the speakers. I have 6 speaker wires running around my man-cave. It's a freaking mess behind the audio reciever.