The Future of HDMI, DisplayPort and Wireless Connectivity

As time goes by we see new monitors appear, with much higher resolutions or with refresh rates, measured in Hz, increasingly 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 Future of HDMI, DisplayPort and Wireless Connectivity

The future of HDMI

Cable HDMI

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.

Comparativa 8K

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.

Distancia Visionado

This means that there are high resolutions that do not make sense on monitors of certain sizes, which forces us to opt for monitors of a large size so that these resolutions are justified.

The other player: the DisplayPort

Display Port

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.

USB C Alt DP

Paradoxically, something that is based on the same concept and does not seem to have had much success is the VitualLink, a variation of the USB C Alt DP designed to be used with virtual reality headsets, which saw support in the NVIDIA RTX 2000 but has disappeared on the RTX 3000.

A future without cables: are HDMI and DisplayPort in danger?

WiGig

With the arrival of Smart TVs, televisions are now PostPC devices, this means that they are really a computer with a smartphone and / or tablet SoC inside and internet connectivity, which implies that they are designed to connect to the network to via cable or Wifi.

But is a wireless transmission from our devices to the TV possible? Obviously it has been possible for a long time but the question is whether such connectivity between devices is possible in order to replace the HDMI or DisplayPort cable, but at high resolutions such as 4K or 8K.

WiGig

The WiGig connectivity should allow this has a bandwidth 7 Gbits / s, it is a wireless connection qu and operates on the spectrum of 60GHz, specifically between 57 and 66 GHz, this prevents through her walls or obstacles large dimensions, so the greatest distance that can exist between the router and the device is 10 meters, so it is not useful if we want to see the content in another room.

Not only that, but its bandwidth is much lower than the 48 Gbps of HDMI 2.1, it is even less than some HDMI 1.x standards so at high resolutions it can only transmit images that are highly compressed and with very low bitrates. , which hurts the experience and if we can’t get it out of the room, we find that the benefits are lost.

AI and Domain Specific Processors to End HDMI and DisplayPort

Cerebro IA

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.