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HDMI port physical compatibility

Sirmyself
By Sirmyself
in Displays
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I know the difference between HDMI 1.4 and 2.0 in terms of supported features, but is there a difference in the pin out or a physical difference on the port that would prevent a motherboard/graphics card manufacturer to develop a driver that would allow support an HDMI 2.0 signal on a previously HDMI 1.4 port?

Dear diary: Today was not tomorrow and not yesterday, which I think is nice... 

//Overengineering example:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
  string s = "Hello World";
  for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); ++i)
  {
      cout << s[i];
  }
  return 0;
}

 

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No physical difference, but the cable may need to be of slightly better quality (it's 18 gbps vs 10.2 gbps through the cable.. nearly double)

You have the same number of TMDS channels, 3, but the frequency increases from 340 Mhz on HDMI 1.4 to 600 Mhz in HDMI 2.0 ... if the silicon chip was designed to, or can only support up to let's say 400-450 Mhz ... then of course it can't do 600 Mhz (or more) required for HDMI 2.0

It could have been a simple cost cutting measure, using less transistors or smaller transistors making the 600 mhz frequency impossible to achieve... or could be a deliberate decision to not support HDMI 2.0 in older video card generation in order to push newer series, or because they don't want to spend the man hours to implement hdmi 2.0 support in drivers, or maybe they don't want to spend the money to re-certify the old chips for hdmi 2.0

 

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27 minutes ago, Sirmyself said:

but is there a difference in the pin out or a physical difference on the port that would prevent a motherboard/graphics card manufacturer to develop a driver that would allow support an HDMI 2.0 signal on a previously HDMI 1.4 port?

The pinout is identical between HDMI 1.4 and 2.0, the difference is in the clock rate/data rate that the transmitter runs at, so don't expect any driver updates that enables it

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