An up-and-coming cable is gaining momentum as a standard in computer and home theatre connections following an upgrade announced yesterday.DisplayPort is a high-performance, fibre-topic cable that now offers bi-directional data control. The standard has recently been upgraded by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to make the cables support up to five times the length of passive cables.
 |
DisplayPort stands out as a cabling standard because of the one-up it has against passive cables that don’t include a chip to strengthen the signal. While traditional copper-based cables will lose some quality over distances longer than 15 feet, the new DisplayPort standard is able to boost signals up to 100 feet on longer cables.
VESA last year worked on upgrading the DisplayPort standard from 1.1 to version 1.2, and yesterday announced the extentios of 1.2 by adding the active signal-boosting component and improved logo labelling to make the end and beginning of cables easily locatable for consumers and installers.
The standard now supports data transfer rates from 10.8Gbps to 21Gbps, uncompressed multi-streaming support for sending multiples of content through at once and doubles as a port for Ethernet and USB 2.0 data.
 |
| Mini DisplayPort on an Apple notebook |
The updated technology has gaining greater steam over the past decade, and the latest addition has made is a major contender as a replacement for older cable connections like DVI for modern home theatres. Since it’s royalty-free, hardware producers are able to include it in their products without any added cost.
