Intel, AMD, Dell, Lenovo, LG and Samsung team up

To abolish the VGA port

WE NOTICED A drop in temperature, but we weren’t aware that hell had frozen over, again. Lo and behold, Intel has teamed up with AMD, Dell, Lenovo and LG and Samsung’s display divisions to abolish the analogue VGA display interface in favor of more modern digital options and no, we’re not talking about DVI here.

Who would’ve imagined that we’d still use the 15-pin D-sub connector in 2010 as the most common means of attaching a display to a PC? Well, it seems like there is a group of companies that have finally grown tired of this old, albeit maybe not entirely useless connector and they’ve now launched a joint program to accelerate the adoption of “scalable and lower power digital interfaces” as in DisplayPort and HDMI. The press release states that Intel and AMD has no real intention of supporting VGA or even LVDS by 2015 and it might be sooner than that.

We can’t say that we’re huge fans of HDMI as a connector for PC displays, although it has become the ubiquitous connector on home entertainment devices and TVs and it’s a standard that isn’t going to go away any time soon. DisplayPort has yet to really take off, although more and more graphics cards seem to support the new connector, be it in its full-size or mini type connector. The problem appears to be the display manufacturers, as they haven’t exactly been in a hurry to adopt the DisplayPort interface, although with Dell, Lenovo, LG and Samsung on board, this will hopefully change.

Both Intel and AMD are looking at dropping its support for LVDS which is currently most often used to connect laptop displays to the graphics card by 2013.  While AMD will start to remove native support for VGA the same year, Intel is sticking with it until 2015, the same year  AMD also plans to have fully stopped supporting it. The press release states that the DVI-I connector will be killed off by 2015 as well, since the DVI-I connector supports VGA signalling. However, it doesn’t mean that the DVI-D connector will be disappearing any time soon, but with a focus on DisplayPort and HDMI, it will most likely dwindle in popularity.

That’s still a few years to go and we can’t say that we’re going to be sorely missing the D-sub connector; in fact, we can’t wait until some more DisplayPort monitors appear on the market. As much as we couldn’t care less about stereoscopic 3D displays which is said to be one of the big advantages of moving to HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2, it’s time to simplify things and move forward to simpler and hopefully better display interfaces. Hopefully this will also lead towards a development of higher resolution, more pixel dense displays, but that’s a different topic altogether.S|A

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