PC and component manufacturers have been gradually eliminating legacy ports over the last few years, but there's still one hanger-on - the venerable VGA port. Despite the introduction of vastly superior alternatives, the 23 year old interface is still a common sight, especially on netbooks and laptops.
But now it looks like VGA could finally be put to pasture, as Intel, AMD, Samsung, Dell and Lenovo have all committed to replace it with digital alternatives by 2015.
According to Intel's Eric Mentzer, "modern digital display interfaces like DisplayPort and HDMI enhance the consumer visual PC experience by immersing them with higher resolutions and deeper colours - all at lower power - to enhance battery life for laptops".
The plan is to drop support for LVDS by 2013 with native VGA support being removed from new products over the course of the following two years. This also means that DVI-I - the dual-purpose analog and digital version of the interface - will be phased out in the same time frame. DisplayPort will then take over for PC monitors, with HDMI being used to connect to TVs.
The announcement does acknowledge that VGA monitors will still be around for quite a while, and that the legacy interface will be a necessary part of desktop computing far beyond 2015. However, the companies will push the adoption of alternative interfaces and encourage the use of certified DisplayPort adapters with older screens.
With AMD and Intel accounting for the majority of graphics processors and having a large say in the design of system boards, they certainly have the clout to dictate which interfaces we all use. Especially in laptops, VGA and LVDS are likely to be pretty scarce by the time we get to the middle of the decade.
