[Hardware] What future awaits both DisplayPort and HDMI?

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more and more impressive. This leads us to wonder to what extent we are going to be able to maintain the current connections and if there is going to be any change in the short, medium or long term in this regard. What future awaits both DisplayPort and HDMI?

 

How will we connect the PCs to our monitors in the future? What complications are manufacturers going to encounter? These are questions that are not usually asked, but every so often a new standard appears that makes our graphics cards and monitors completely obsolete, so it is important to scan the horizon from time to time.

 

The HDMI is still sane for a while, version 2.1 of the standard supports 8K resolutions at 120 Hz refresh rates without problems. If you don't know what that means then it is best to take into account the number of pixels that are transmitted in each refresh of the screen itself.

A 4K resolution (3840x 2160 pixels) has about 4 times more pixels than a Full HD resolution (1920 × 1080), but a resolution at 8K is about 4 times more than one at 4K, so we are talking about a resolution of about 16 times higher than in Full HD.

We cannot forget the fact that the resolution is completely related to the viewing distance and screens at 4K resolutions are only justified in large sizes, since the human eye, depending on the distance in which it is looking at the screen, cannot capture the image. pixel density from a certain amount.

 

DisplayPort version 2.0 is also designed for 8K, so for a long time an improvement in the standard is not necessary, since it will not be limited, at least for a few years and the same concepts that apply to HDMI are valid for the DisplayPort.

What we do believe is that we are going to see the emergence of USB C type Alt DP cables, which integrate DisplayPort and USB connectivity in a single cable. Specifically version 2.0 we believe that it will become the de facto standard and it is very possible that we will see in the future monitors that work with a single cable instead of several, where the cable serves both to transmit the information of the image and power supply of the display itself, thus reducing the number of cables and connectors.

 

To allow the leap to completely wireless connectivity, it is necessary to overcome the bandwidth limitations of this type of connections and there are two ways to do it.

 

The first is through placing neural processors in TV SoCs with the ability to run super-resolution algorithms that end up displaying higher resolution images from other lower resolution ones. The second would be through placing very high-speed data decompression units, in such a way that those 7 Gbps become a much higher bandwidth.

The idea is no different from the data decompressors that we will begin to see in the CPUs and GPUs associated with data access to solid disks. Obviously these processors have to evolve a lot, but there is a market that sees a huge advantage in not having the monitor tied to the PC through the HDMI or DisplayPort cable, that market may welcome the possibility of connecting its displays wirelessly to the PC.