The DL-5500 chipset will allow USB 3.0 to transmit 3840 x 2160 resolution

Jan 15, 2014 12:49 GMT  ·  By

DisplayLink has long been supplying the world with ways to connect your monitor to your machine, or your machine to your monitor, via universal serial bus, and now it is going an extra mile by adding 4K support.

4K, or ultra high-definition video, defines streams that display images in a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. That's the cinematic resolution anyway. There are other variations, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, DisplayLink is responsible for the existence of USB monitors, and its DL-Series of chipsets is about to get an upgrade.

Specifically, from DL-5500 onwards, it will be possible to play 4K UHD video over Universal Serial Bus 3.0 ports.

Granted, it's been possible to deliver 4K for a while, but only over dual head HD outputs. DL-5500 will allow a single USB 3.0 connection to do that.

Connecting a DisplayLink adapter to a DisplayPort will further increase the top resolution of 4096 x 3072 pixels.

Sadly, no products with the DL-5500 chip have been announced yet. Not that we'd have expected it to happen so soon.

Besides, running multiple monitors on a PC is usually done by connecting them to the outputs of the video card instead.

Even systems without add-in boards usually have more than one video output, seeing as how CPUs and APUs have their own built-in video chips.

Verily, DisplayLink adapters and chipsets are mostly useful for laptops, when owners want a second screen to work on during a trip or something. Professional tablets can do the same though.

DisplayLink DL-5500 will be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports, thanks to dynamic compression engine that crams video data enough to still fit inside the narrower bus.

All in all, we're looking at something a league above the previous generation, which was limited to 2560 x 1600 (16:10).