DisplayLink is enjoying life at the moment. The company has progressed well with some key breakthroughs that we have reported before for its display over USB compression technology. The company has seen the inclusion of a driver in the standard Windows distribution as a key enabler, as corporates do not need to worry about or qualify drivers. The company has also been pushing the technology on in terms of capacity and at the show was highlighting that it is being used in the wireless adaptor for the HTC Vive (an application we highlighted at MWC). It is also working with HTC on wireless for the Vive Pro, which has higher resolution displays.
DisplayLink Technology is being used in the wireless HTC Vive and the bidirectional nature of USB makes it a good interface for this application. Image:Meko
The use of a GPU for doing the processing is also proving very useful for the company. Although the driver technology can run on a CPU, the parallelism of its algorithms means much more efficiency on a GPU, but also a low load on the CPU. It can even process high loads such as UltraHD video on relatively low power CPUs such as the Intel Core M series.
The use of a GPU also speeds the operation of the codec, reducing latency and meaning that the latency is very low, so that the technology is even suitable for gaming. This, combined with the wide adoption of USB Type C is allowing the company to reach into all parts of the market. The use of a GPU is also possible on the Mac OS and the firm reminded us that it has drivers for Windows, MacOS, Chrome, Android and Ubuntu Linux.
DisplayLink showed the low latency when a GPU is running its codec. Image:Meko
On display was a full range of different universal docks that the company’s technology is now used in and all the big names of the PC world, both in systems and accessories were covered. The firm is confident that it has been able to see off some low cost competition from China that was trying to develop a few years ago.
The company always likes to push the boundaries of what is possible and was showing eight FullHD monitors being driven from a single PC and single USB Type-C connection, via a number of docks, for a total display load of 8k x 4k at 60fps.
We said to the company that we were surprised that it is not doing anything to exploit this kind of capability in the video wall market. The comment back was “watch out for something interesting at Infocomm”. Remember that you read it here, first!
