I wish they made the screen 120hz and support hdmi or display port. 5K@27” has the sweet advantage of integer downscaling to 1440p, which is quite ideal for games unless you have a really top of the line graphics card.
the bandwidth of 120Hz/5K is too high for current Thunderbolt connections. It does support 120Hz/4K but the higher resolution puts it over the edge. It is the same reason that the Apple XDR display is 60Hz/6K. Bandwidth limits.
If you are interested in games, you likely don't want a high resolution monitor anyway. Those of us who do need the higher res of 5K value that above refresh rate and are likely not going to play any games on what is more of a work screen. Different use cases.
Yes, it's very unfortunate that silicon photonics never hit critical mass. It's intensely painful to constantly see these bandwidth limitations run into and have to deal with ludicrously expensive active cables with extremely short lengths because of the stubborn sticking to copper, when plain old cheap OM3 will cheerfully do 100 Gbps at hundreds of feet. Someday I hope to see the last of copper for data.
That said, if Apple really wanted to they could definitely do a multistream system like some of the bleeding edge High DPI screens did way back when. Require two Thunderbolt connections to drive it. But whether these 5K panels actually even can be driven at 120 Hz is another question and always a balancing act in this stuff particularly since presumably companies of Apple's scale have a bit of a clearer picture of what's in the pipe.
>If optical material is as cheap as you say it is, then why are optical cables so expensive? A few meters can run for hundreds of dollars.
This a day old but I just noticed and have to say: WAT!? Go to fs.com or monoprice or wherever else, look at even the super well armored ultra durable direct burial OM4 like:
That's as nice as it gets, fully customized to exactly the length and connectors you and, and 7' is $11.54. 100' is $60.26. And again that's about as fancy and durable as it gets. Plain old OM3, still perfectly suitable indoors for 100 gigabit at hundreds of feet, is $19 for 100'.
So I'm honestly utterly perplexed at what you're even talking about. Even ultra-low loss very dense 400G rated fiber isn't "a few meters for hundreds of dollars". If you see this I'd be kind of curious what you're thinking. Some sort of cutting edge terabit stuff? Were you looking at something with dozens of strands in a cable and thinking it was single strand?
>that's the only example of a working and commercially available data-carrying optical cable that I know of
????? What exactly do you think every single optical fiber on the planet is carrying if not data? What do you think is special about the bits and bytes going over TCP/IP or FibreChannel or whatever vs Thunderbolt? Data is data. The cables I linked will do 2-10x the bandwidth of that Thunderbolt 3 one.
Second, the whole problem with that TB3 cable is that it has to go back to copper at each end, so it carries an active chipset and low volume transceiver in there to translate. It's not the optical part that is causing trouble, quite the contrary it's massively cheaper than copper. It's the legacy copper part that's hurting plus just plain Thunderbolt still being relatively niche, high end and until fairly recently still very restricted and proprietary, which resulted in an effective monopoly for Corning and ludicrous profit margin in turn. What I was lamenting in my original post is that the native connectors on boards didn't move to optical for data long ago. A 40 gigabit standalone transceiver like this [0] is $39 right now. It could be even cheaper if it was integrated on standard motherboards like USB or whatever else, both because of sheer economies of scale there is a lot of supporting material and such there going into that which could be done away with if modularity didn't matter. And after that you get to go up to 450' (or further with single mode at more cost). 100' costs another $39. 100 gigabit transceivers currently start at ~$100 for 100 meters, or thousands of meters for $190.
Obviously none of these carry power (though that can be an advantage in some cases where power fluctuations might be a concern), but it'd be trivial to make a cable with a couple of plain conductors along with it. If all they need to do is carry power and no data it'd still be very cheap. Data transfer is also much more efficient over optical vs copper, saving power and in turn heat.
And optical easily scales not just in cost but in bandwidth as technology evolves without needing to buy new cables. OM3 was standardized in ISO-11801:2002, so twenty years ago. If you got an OM3 fiber cable back when they first came out, that exact same cable would still be perfectly functional and useful to carry 100 gigabits for hundreds of feet right now, which wasn't even defined in 802.3 for nearly another decade afterwards. Can't exactly say the same thing about 20 year old copper cables.
Of course that isn't the way the world went for a variety of reasons. But it's a real shame.
My problem is that I only want 1 monitor for everything. For work I want a high res screen because I really don't like blurry text. For games I would like a high frequency one because it's well... better. 5K has the advantage of downscaling to 1440p gracefully. If it only did 1440p@120hz and 5K@60hz I'd be happy.
Thunderbolt/DisplayPort 1.4 has enough bandwidth for 120Hz and 5k using Display Stream Compression. There might not be enough bandwidth left over for the USB hub, but frankly, I'd take that tradeoff. If I were going to buy such an expensive monitor, I'd want to be able to do whatever I damn well please on it, including gaming (even if the resolution of the game needs to be dialed down to 1440p).
