VESA shines with DisplayPort 1.1, but did consumers really win a champion?
Up until about six months ago I really thought UDI would be
the next-generation PC high-definition interface. And why not, it was
royalty free, electronically compatible with DVI (and HDMI), and supposedly,
cheap to implement.
DisplayPort, on the other hand, is not electronically compatible with any of
the DVI derivatives, introduces a separate copy-protection scheme and still
doesn't have a shipping product. UDI technically doesn't either, but
since it's built on DVI, the only real hurdle is pushing the manufacturers
to implement.
Today, it's looking like DisplayPort is pretty much going to happen. AMD
and ATI were both big proponents of DisplayPort even before the merger, and
that has only amplified with the merger.
Philips, the company behind the DisplayPort Content Protection scheme, has deep
relations with virtually every major PC manufacturer. Not surprisingly,
Philips also has the most to gain from DisplayPort as DPCP is not royalty
free. HDCP, the de facto DRM standard on HDMI, DVI and UDI, is licensed
by a subsidiary of Intel.
Several weeks ago I had a conference call with Intel to discuss its position on
UDI, which solidified my feeling that the standard is dead in the water.
In a nutshell, the company isn't pursuing UDI development anymore --
DisplayPort has taken the center stage.
Intel is technically still members of the Unified Display Interface Work Group,
though the only PC manufacturer actively exclusively involved in the project is
Apple. Silicon Image, a heavy advocate of HDMI and all things HDCP, is
quite possibly UDI's strongest proponent left. However, the reason
many vendors jumped to the DisplayPort camp was to avoid royalties from HDCP
and HDMI certification aggressively promoted by Silicon Image.
Of course, with the DisplayPort 1.1 ratification yesterday, VESA has brought
the whole train full circle. For interoperability with HDMI devices,
vendors will need to adopt HDMI certification. Instead of just HDCP, we
now have DPCP and HDCP -- neither which are interoperable but we will most
certainly get a third-party technology to bridge that gap which will certainly
not be royalty-free. And finally, instead of refining the DVI
platform further, as with HDMI and UDI, DisplayPort introduces a new electronic
setup that vendors have no experience dealing with yet.
It certainly is ironic to see the DVI and HDMI pitfalls VESA promised to avoid
take center stage in the DisplayPort 1.1 ratification.
“And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say?” -- Bill Gates on the Mac ads
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Latest By Kristopher Kubicki
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