DVI appears to be losing to HDMI and DisplayPort

While the resolution of the high-def disc format war may end up with few consumers winning, if any, another battle may have bigger consequences: It's about high-bandwidth digital interfaces for connecting PCs, consoles, and displays.

This battle pits the old-guard DVI (digital visual interface) against newer rivals HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) and DisplayPort in the industry race for connecting PCs and other devices over high bandwidth networks.

Chipmakers such as Intel and AMD are now supporting DisplayPort, as are PC makers such as Dell and Lenovo. But meanwhile, HDMI already swept past the existing DVI standard last year, particularly among HDTV displays.

DVI shipments will fall from 112 million device shipments in 2007 to only three million shipments in 2007, according to In-Stat analyst Brian O'Rourke. In contrast, a total of 143 million HDMI-enabled devices shipped last year, including 90 percent of all digital TVs that went out the door.

But although HDMI is expected to have dominated the market in 2007, DisplayPort will ultimately emerge as the top competitor to DVI, says a recent report by In-Stat.

According to other observers, a fourth standard, the relatively low-cost UDI (Unified Display Interface), was also in the running, until Intel switched its allegiance from UDI to DisplayPort, leaving Samsung in the lurch.

Regardless of considerable and ongoing technical debate over the pros and cons of these various digital interface formats, HDMI and DisplayPort have each been gaining hefty vendor support, while support for DVI is on the wane. Beyond the addition of Intel, backers of DisplayPort also include AMD, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Samsung, Philips, and NVIDIA, to name just a few.

Meanwhile, however, a number of PC notebook makers also released HDMI-enabled products in 2007, including Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Toshiba.

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