News Intel warns of impending high-resolution explosion

I like they idea of a higher pixel density, but I don't really need more than my 1080 laptop.
It would be nice to get that 1080 in a smaller, lighter laptop than I currently have though.

Of coarse if something replaces BluRay with a higher pixel standard, then I may well want that in the future.

 

hmm, I was just talking with my history of technology professor about how intel has been pushing the HD trend to encourage consumers to buy more powerful computers.

Netbooks jump to mind, there were some precursors like the OLPC, but the actual marketing trend was unquestionably pioneered by ASUS. But I do agree, somehow apple - without innovating any new hardware of it's own - has become the driving force behind tech culture trends.

 

Well obviously intel would be pushing something like this, but since they don't actually make a complete product (just parts for products), its kinda hard for them to get anywhere with their motives. That's like saying tire manufacturers for cars want their customers to hit the brakes harder and peel out, but you can't just get your customers to push their hardware to its limits.

As for netbooks, I didn't even think about them but once again that's apple's doing. Asus may be the one that made netbooks popular, but Apple is the one that started the idea, with the original Macbook Air. The funny thing about the Air is it was the first (AFAIK) that used intel's Atom CPU, but then intel was like "wait a minute, we made the processor, why does it have to be exclusive to apple?" so then they sold it to companies like Asus, which sold a similar product to Air for a much more reasonable price. And since then, Air has been wildly unpopular because tablets and non-apple netbooks are better for their value.

 

I would love retina class computer monitors, though I am more interested in the awesome black levels of OLED displays. Computer LCDs are horrible when it comes to black levels, and plasma technology can't get high resolution at such a small screen.

 

With growing resolutions, Ctrl + will be my best friend. Time to start investing in Monocles me thinks!

 

yay!
but there will be challenges to go through, but windows 8 probably has that covered if its more resolution independant.

graphics cards might get massive for the eyefinity stuff though...

 

I doubt it Intel, manufacturers can barely be bothered to produce a decent 1080p notebook screen at any semi decent price, there is no way we're getting even higher resolutions at $1000 ultrabook level anytime soon without some SERIOUS compromise such as no real GPU to back it.

 

If Apple put a 'retina display' on a macbook air then I doubt manufacturers would have any choice.

 

The basic concept of a netbook had nothing to do with apple, they originated from the OLPC [One Laptop per Child] initiative to provide low cost systems to the 3rd world.

All this talk of high res displays is making me weak at the knees, there is one major problem that needs to be addressed particularly for desktop systems, that is display interface technologies. As it currently stands dvi remains the defacto standard even though display port has been around for many years now. Problem is display port doesn't provide that much more bandwidth than dual-link dvi. Right now if a manufacturer pushed the interface to it's limit a screen would be limited to 2560x1600 @ 120hz or 5120x3200 @ 60hz. Therefore it's time for a new display interface technology or a major revamp of display port to allow for bandwidths next generation screens will require.

 

Or you could, you know, let your high-end GPU handle scaling with a wee tiny bit of its rather extensive power. For the life of me I can't figure out how to fully disable scaling on my radeon....

Just improve the transducers to go for higher bandwidth and there, job = done. From an architectural perspective, it's _that_ easy. Implementation-wise, we have Thunderbolt around with the necessary bandwidth. Apply TBolt PHY layer with DP signalling and its done.

Remember, CAT-7 (now called Class F cabling) cabling (4 twisted pairs, 4 "lanes") will do 100Gbit/s over 100m (with 32/22nm chips they say) so we most definitely have the base tech for it, especially considering DisplayPort does a "mere" 17.28Gbit/s over 4 lanes

 

That's still plenty of headroom if all the display manufacturers do is double the pixel count of existing displays in both directions. Besides, DisplayPort can always be improved with faster signal clock speeds. It's very easy to boost speeds with a serial interface this way.

 

It's just enough headroom for a doubling, but i'd suspect that there would also be a market for 300dpi screens in professional industries. Then you factor in higher refresh rates, larger screen sizes and what headroom might have been there is extremely quickly gone. Whilst it maybe easy to boost speeds with a serial interface the same limitations always apply, that is you may get backwards compatibility with the input controller but no forwards compatibility with previous generation output controllers. Will it end up coming down to requiring a new dp revision every year to cater for ever increasing pixel densities? It all just ends up being a compatibility nightmare.

 

Well in that case you could say apple didn't have anything to do with touchscreens, tablets, mp3 players, online music stores, computerized TVs, smartphones, and probably a lot more things I can't think of ATM. Apple doesn't invent anything, they're one of the least original companies out there. The only difference is apple makes a solid product that for some weird reason becomes wildly popular due to a spokesperson in straight-leg jeans and a black turtleneck, and then other manufacturers decide at last minute that this unoriginal product is suddenly a good idea because apple says so.

 

Posted this a little earlier (couple of edits as well for clarity's sake):

As a student in electrical engineering (and general tech enthusiast), I reckon I'm speaking sense here.

 

Nice over reaction, only it was Steve Jobs himself that said that apple would never produce a netbook. All technology is interrelated, and it's not hard to draw relations between the two. But the ultimate question for me is would one exist if the other hadn't, and in that respect had the Air not existed the netbook still would have. If the Macbook Air was a netbook then yes it would be fair to say that they had a major role it popularizing the technology, but it isn't and was never meant to be a netbook, it was a slim light notebook - it used the same hardware, it ran the same software and it was priced accordingly. The original netbook used customized low power hardware, it ran different software and above all else was designed to be cheap. If you look at the pc equivalent of the Air we now have intel and other manufacturers pushing ultrabooks, they are the descendants of the Air not netbooks.

Thanks ZeDestructor, I agree that the solution is already available but I'm not worried about technology availability but rather that it is implemented. Dual-link DVI was always a part of the DVI standard, and it was a part of ATI and Nvidias reference card designs for many generations but manufacturers only ever used Single-link DVI outputs. In 2004 Apple release their first 30" 2560x1600 monitor, but due to the lack of dual-link dvi support only several of their cards and a small hand full of professional level cards were fully compatible. Dell release their first 30" around 18 months later and these had to be timed accordingly with a new generation of dual-link dvi enabled graphics cards so that they could be used at there full spec by the consumer market. Dell probably could have released there's earlier seeing as they used the exact same panel as apples but it was pointless doing so with out the compatible output hardware. If high res screens are about to make a massive appearance then it's time that we had a display interface with some serious bandwidth ready to go, otherwise development will be stifled all over again.

 

Surely we have thunderbolt for this. Intel did just develop it (along side apple of course.)

 

What's the opposite of fanboy?

 

Yup, I don't see the use for more than "HD" on small devices.
The result is that you get interpolation when playing video's...

For big screens, sure, I understand. But do we really need more than 1920x1080 at 10"?
Remember, full resolution video's weigh in at ~5-10GB per Hour...try pulling that over wireless

 

And I totally disagree with Intel.

Good luck trying to play a game at those resolutions on a laptop. Changing the resolution to a lower one will just make it look awful on an LCD.

This will of course be a marketing gimmick, again. Something Intel would love of course, to sell more of their products.

 

Sure gaming at the native res is going to be a challenge, especially for the latest and greatest titles. However there is an advantage to higher resolution screens that needs to be considering. The reason why outputing a non-native reslution looks considerably worse than a native res is regardless of the output resolution, the display is always going to output it's native resolution. Therefore there has to be a level of interpolation to 'guess' what the missing pixels would actually be.

Depending on the screen this can be reasonably good to down right terrible, blurry text etc. However if you can reduce the resolution by a factor of 4x then what you get is perfect scaling, each pixel becomes larger and interpolation isn't required. If we were to do that right now with a 1080p screen the end result is 960x540 this certainly isn't a res you'd want to game at, expecially when 1080p gaming is possible.

Boost the native res to 2560x1600, this scales down to 1280x800. That's a res that many a laptop currently ships as a native resolution and will provide a nice trade off between gaming and general application usage. Aliasing will be more problematic with such systems, but a higher level of anti-aliasing will be easier to deal with than 4x more pixels to render. Just to note scaling down a current 30" 2560x1600 screen to 1280x800 yields excellent results, yes everything is big but the over all image quality is great. Shrink this down to a 13-15" screen and the results will be considerably better.