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Comment by gmays | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully they'll release an updated 5K version of the Thunderbolt Display. They haven't updated it in years, I was really hoping for it today.

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As I mentioned in the other thread, there's just not enough bandwidth to drive at 60fps over a single bus / single cable with DisplayPort 1.2 without compression (DP v1.2 gives about 17.3Gbps usable bandwidth which is just not enough). The iMac allows them to bypass that bottleneck by interfacing directly with the graphics card.

My predication is that once we see Apple deploy Thunderbolt 3 / DisplayPort 1.3 (capable of 25.9Gbps usable bandwidth [1]), we'll see the Apple Cinema Display Retina.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/190130-displayport-1-...

That's why many people were expecting the iMac to come first. Since it's an integrated machine the panel can be connected directly to the graphics card via LVDS (or whatever the current version is) instead of the limitations of the external cabling the Mac Pro or (for an external monitor) MacBook Pro have.

Thunderbolt and display port 1.2 can't oush that many pixels. Need to wait for display port 1.3

Can their current Thunderbolt connections drive a display of this resolution?

Not 60fps over a single cable / single bus without compression.

DisplayPort v1.2 can carry around 17.3Gbps (this is minus overhead), so you would need DP v1.3 with an effective rate of 26Gbps to support native at 5k without compression [1].

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/190130-displayport-1-...

What about dual cables in MST?

This seems like a rather large oversight.

It's a technical limitation, not an oversight. No current Mac can output that much data over a single port.

I think they might be waiting for a bigger refresh of the Mac Mini to power it

With the amount of custom chips they needed for the display, it wouldn't surprise me if there are issues getting it to work as an external display that they haven't solved yet.

They have to update their notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 before they can release 5K Thunderbolt Display. Thunderbolt 2 doesn't have enough bandwidth to push the pixels.

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