There have long been rumors of Apple releasing a standalone, large screen retina display. With recent reports of limited Apple Store inventory of Thunderbolt Displays, the rumor mills are back in business, whispering the possibility of a 5K 27″ thunderbolt display announcement at next week’s WWDC.
From this MacRumors post:
Only the late 2013 Mac Pro, late 2014 or newer 27″ Retina 5K iMac, and mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro with AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics are capable of driving 5K external displays, however, and each setup requires using two Thunderbolt cables per display. The lack of support is due to bandwidth limitations of the DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 specs on current Macs.
DisplayPort 1.3 has increased bandwidth, but Skylake-based Macs with Thunderbolt 3 will not support the spec and Intel’s next-generation Kaby Lake processors on track for a late 2016 launch will not as well. Apple could opt to release a 4K Thunderbolt Display instead, but supply chain considerations make this unlikely, so the company’s exact plans for the future of its standalone display remain to be seen.
In this post, John Gruber posed the question:
A 27-inch standalone retina display will be a genuine finally. If they announce it at WWDC, the crowd will go nuts. But just how they’ll drive it is a fascinating question. Using two Thunderbolt cables would be clunky. Maybe one cable that forks into two Thunderbolt adapters at the end?
All that is background for the linked post, where Rene Ritchie explores the tree of possibilities for driving a 5K display.
I do find it fascinating that we’ve come to a fork in the road where we have everything we need to add in a 5K display, with the exception of a single port to drive it.
Forget 5k, where’s 7k?
A few companies now sell 34″ 3440×1440 ultra-wide displays. I’d like a retina version of that.
I don’t need 5k, but I do need to know that the week after I buy my next Mac won’t be the week Apple replaces Thunderbolt 2 with 3.
TB3 can drive it with one cable, albeit through MST using the two video streams it can carry. That seems like the most likely route, barring Intel pulling out some quick TB revision to toss in single DP 1.3 capability.
Alternatively we can go into crazy theoretical methods involving external GPUs. The obvious way would be to stick a fat GPU in the screen to drive it, and the computer effectively hooks up to the GPU through TB3. If you’re hooking up a weaker machine, hey you have a beefier GPU there to run the screen, if you already have a good GPU you can do a frame buffer pass through trick. The alternative GPU method would be some super simple GPU and only do the pass through trick. It’d be the (relatively) simpler and cheaper method of the crazy methods.
Course any method right now would basically be a stop gap until DP 1.3/1.4 so nothing is really ideal at this point.
If Apple doesn’t release this thing as a “native” PCIe Thunderbolt 2/3 device running an embedded ARM with an “external” GPU, they’re flat out doing it wrong. AppleTV v4-level, running an iOS core or bust. To me, this is the “make or break” whether Apple has lost the hunger for innovation.
Remember all of those rumors about an Apple television? This should have been a DONE DEAL a year ago.