Apple Reportedly Developing 5K Retina Thunderbolt Display With Integrated GPU (hothardware.com)

MojoKid quotes a report from HotHardware: If you head over to Apple's website, the Cupertino outfit will happily sell you a 27-inch Thunderbolt display for $999, at least until its inventory runs out. Word on the web is that it's nearly out of stock and Apple doesn't plan to replenish them. Instead, Apple will launch a new version of its Thunderbolt monitor, one that's been upgraded to a 5K resolution and has a discrete GPU stuffed inside. It's an interesting product actually, if you think about it. Depending on the task, it can take some serious graphics muscle to drive a 5K resolution display. It amounts to over 14.7 million pixels (5120x2880), compared to Apple's current generation Thunderbolt display which runs at 2560x1440, or less than 3.7 million pixels. Apple's thinking is likely that if it integrates a GPU capable of driving a 5K resolution into the display itself, it won't have to worry about trying to balance graphics performance with thin and light designs for its future Mac systems.

Comments

Re:How?

[TheRaven64]

Thunderbolt can, among other things, encapsulate PCIe. You effectively end up with a discrete GPU that has slightly higher latency than the attached one, but all of the rendering is done on the GPU and the final image is output directly to the display. You'll upload textures, geometry, and shaders to the external GPU via Thunderbolt, but you won't be streaming rendered images over the connection.

This isn't a very surprising development. At least one third-party has been providing external GPUs for Macs since shortly after they started shipping with Thunderbolt (you can also buy a simple PCIe enclosure that plugs into Thunderbolt and lets you plug in other cards). Moving the GPU into the display (which, in an Apple monitor, already uses the PCIe parts of Thunderbolt to provide USB, Firewire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, audio, and a camera) is a pretty logical step and one that several people had predicted.

Re:How?

[BasilBrush]

Don't sent pixels.

You're sending the instructions that go into the GPU, not the pixel data that comes out of the GPU. So you're sending polygon vertices and textures and so on. Worst case is video, and then you are sending an mpeg stream, which is a lot less bandwidth than number of pixels times number of frames.

Re:How?

[itamihn]

That's no problem. You can always buy next year the new model.

Re:How?

[Megane]

It could be as easy as updated GPU firmware to support a new codec (but not for your GPL Codec of the Week). In the worst case, it's still over a link that is already designed to run a 4K monitor, so unless you had a full 5K source, you could send the raw decoded video and the GPU in the monitor would upscale to full screen resolution.

This isn't some kind of crappy USB3 here, Thunderbolt is set up to be basically a PCI-e x2 or x4 port. The question is, what's it's future? Apple has had some pretty cool technologies that died when the rest of the world finally caught up with a different technology, in particular Firewire. Intel has accepted it, I don't see any other technology leap-frogging it yet, and it is possible that Thunderbolt over USB-C could actually catch on. (which could make the mini-DisplayPort version fall to the curse, ha ha)

I hate this a lot less than cramming the whole computer (something you want to upgrade more often than the screen) into a nice screen like current iMacs. Making a KVM switch for it could be tricky, though.