DisplayLink goes ‘Pro’ to highlight even faster speeds

Synaptics and its customers are debuting a new logo for the fall: DisplayLink Pro, which will be DisplayLink’s answer to the next-gen, high-bandwidth offerings from the USB and Thunderbolt camps.

The new logo is important, because that will really be the only indicator that Synaptics’ next-gen DL-7000 chip is inside the new DisplayLink Pro docks. While Thunderbolt and USB docks use standardized interfaces, the capabilities of a DisplayLink dock depend on the Synaptics chip inside.

DisplayLink docks serve as an alternative to Thunderbolt, and have typically been low-cost, stable alternatives to higher-priced Thunderbolt docks. Because DisplayLink docks use hardware compression to reduce the bandwidth — essentially undetectable while using most apps, outside of gaming — the number of displays that can be connected can surpass USB or Thunderbolt. At Dell’s recent Dell World conference, for example, Synaptics executives said that they connected a grand total of six 4K displays to a Dell XPS computer.

Synaptics is now referring to its technology in slightly different language: as a “software graphics card,” and that its technology is “GPU agnostic” and not dependent upon any hidden features in discrete or integrated GPUs.

Further reading: Best DisplayLink docks 2024: Move over, Thunderbolt

Mark Hachman / IDG

Mark Hachman / IDG

Mark Hachman / IDG

The new DL-7000 chipset is designed for high-refresh-rate displays; Alban Rampon, a senior product manager at Synaptics, said that the chipset can support a single 1080p display running at 240Hz. DisplayLink Pro docks can also support 4K displays running at 120Hz or a single 4K display at 144Hz. Other features include support for 2.5-gigabit Ethernet.

“Generally, this is associated with gaming, but it’s a way of saying that we’re building this in so that it will trickle down and work with your next monitor,” Rampon said.

Andy Davis, the director of corporate marketing at Synapatics, said that the Pro is backwards-compatible with earlier DisplayLink hardware. The docks will also quietly update themselves in the background, as well.

Synaptics is also taking advantage of the fact that each of its docks now include what essentially is a small system, with a CPU and a display processor. At the Computex show in Taiwan this week, the company showed off a capability to allow customers (dock makers) to essentially write applications to the dock itself. It’s unclear how far customers could push this, but in one example, the dock showed a message pushed by a fictitious company’s IT department reminding them of upcoming changes.