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Intel's Skylake Chips Will Drive Three 4K Monitors at 60Hz

AngerDanger said:
I must be one of the few who don't see the appeal. From most viewing distances, I cannot discern between individual pixels on my 1080p monitor, and that's when I'm wearing my glasses, contacts, pocket protector, etc.
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It's just marketing. They always want you to buy the newest, shiniest machine available because it supports 4K.
 
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AngerDanger said:
I must be one of the few who don't see the appeal. From most viewing distances, I cannot discern between individual pixels on my 1080p monitor, and that's when I'm wearing my glasses, contacts, pocket protector, etc.
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You wear glasses and contacts at the same time? Man, that would make...like...everything Retina!
 
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Really not bad, considering a dedicated nVidia GTX970 does 3494gigaflops, about 1/3rd of the is not bad for integrated graphics. That's not taking into consideration how much more power efficient the intel processor is. Intel is finally stepping up in the video performance area.
 
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Flunkyturtle said:
Thunderbolt 3 will be my only reason to upgrade my RMB.
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I'm guessing apple will release a tb display with a single USB cable instead of power + TB cable. That's going to be my reasons. USB-C ports, IMO, can take more of a beating when plugging in/out thousands of times.
 
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lostngone said:
In my opinion these multi-protocol cables are a bad idea. All the consumer know is they have a port that look like X and get upset when they plug something in and it doesn't work. Only to have someone explain to them they have a early 2015 Macbook and they need a late 2015 model to make it work.
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And I don't understand how there can't be electrical cross-talk. The shielding can't be that great when you can have the wires for an upto 100W "something" turning on and off right next to your video signal wires.
 
I'm happy I waited for a rMBP. I hope they put 2-4 USB-C ports on the 13" and 4-6 on the 15". That way you can do what you wish with these ports.

If the 13" comes with Quad core I'll be buying that, otherwise the 15" it is.
 
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Barry Bishop said:
and when are we going to see a Mac Pro update?!?!?
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With faster memory chips in the pipeline and SSD storage costs dropping, plus now with Skylake on the horizon, I wouldn't be surprised if there's an update at the end of this year.

I wonder when graphics technology is going to plateau. We're at a point now where a dozen CPUs don't have much effect on graphics performance; everything's now pushed to the GPUs. But at some point, an increase in resolution will be irrelevant, since the human eye can perceive only so much. Meanwhile, every leap in GPU architecture raises the bar for software graphics, which then makes current hardware obsolete. I'd come to expect that every few years, but now it's happening every few months.
 
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lostngone said:
In my opinion these multi-protocol cables are a bad idea. All the consumer know is they have a port that look like X and get upset when they plug something in and it doesn't work. Only to have someone explain to them they have a early 2015 Macbook and they need a late 2015 model to make it work.
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The problem isn't with the multi-protocol cable, it's that if you're going to have a multi-protocol cable you have to be sure the device supports all of the protocols. If Apple knew TB was going to run over USB-C connectors, they shouldn't have released the Macbook they did-- I'm not looking forward to the confusion it creates.

A small part of me hopes it's just a firmware update away from enabling TB over that port, but I think that's unlikely. The spec is published now-- if they were going to do it they'd have done it by now.
 
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Analog Kid said:
The problem isn't with the multi-protocol cable, it's that if you're going to have a multi-protocol cable you have to be sure the device supports all of the protocols. If Apple knew TB was going to run over USB-C connectors, they shouldn't have released the Macbook they did-- I'm not looking forward to the confusion it creates.
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You mean Apple should have held off Mini DisplayPort on any Mac until Thunderbolt became standard using the same port to avoid confusion?

I agree this will always cripple the current rMB somewhat though. A first-gen product, so it's to be expected.
 
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What I don't get is... are Apple going to ditch the Thunderbolt branding and stick with USB C (ie. new MacBook) or find a way to differentiate the two? Confusing times, exciting tech.
 
Nice..

Since the chip is cable of supporting 4K monitors whats to stop 4K becoming a standard on laptops?

Apple is already there with 27" 5K iMac's and i don't even think it has this yet..
 
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jayducharme said:
With faster memory chips in the pipeline and SSD storage costs dropping, plus now with Skylake on the horizon, I wouldn't be surprised if there's an update at the end of this year.

I wonder when graphics technology is going to plateau. We're at a point now where a dozen CPUs don't have much effect on graphics performance; everything's now pushed to the GPUs. But at some point, an increase in resolution will be irrelevant, since the human eye can perceive only so much. Meanwhile, every leap in GPU architecture raises the bar for software graphics, which then makes current hardware obsolete. I'd come to expect that every few years, but now it's happening every few months.
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Graphics resolution isn't driving GPU technology any more, parallel computation is. Things like computer vision, physics simulations, machine learning and real time image and video manipulation are leading the charge. I think resolution is more limited by the communications bus to the displays.

I'm not sure there will be a plateau, but rate of increase will probably settle in around where it is for CPUs-- where's it's mostly limited by die size and heat dissipation. The next challenge, I suspect, will be to more tightly couple the CPU and GPU to avoid the massive bottle neck of memory transfer. I always thought Cell would catch on better than it did, but it looks like the future may be more along the lines of what Intel and Nvidia are doing-- coupling CPU and GPU resources in a single package with shared memory between them. For certain OpenCL activities, I've found the integrated graphics on my rMBP outperform the discrete because of the lower memory transfer overhead.
 
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unplugme71 said:
Dude, 5k is so 2014. 8k LG monitors are what's happening now. And the new 12k coming out in the fall will be rad.

Maybe in 2020, we'll have 256k monitors, you know, to fill your entire wall.
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Ha! TBH, I think a 30" 6-8K would be just about perfect. 28" feels like it could use a bit more space, and 32" is a bit too much screen to fit in your field of view.
 
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