datacenter guys didn't like digitals. they embrace blurry SVGA pictures coming through excessively long cables and sometimes mechanical switches, and to them DVI/HDMI felt to be an all-or-nothing risk factor
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Server hardware comes with VGA, because everything in the server room (think KVM switches, external remote KVM, local 19" consoles) is built with VGA. And that will be the case as long as server hardware comes with VGA.
I will be very surprised if it doesn't start switching over to USB-C over the next decade or two. Having a single port capable of doing the entire local KVM dance using readily-available hardware is just a no-brainer.
Some switches have already started using USB-C for serial instead of RJ45. When the technician is 100% already carrying a smartphone and C-to-C cable to charge it, making the console available with zero additional adapters is quite attractive.
So, display out from USB-C cable is not display signal over USB 3.x digital signal, it's just an electronic analog patch-through to GPU. The pins in the port actually run raw DisplayPort signals when that feature is activated. So you can't plug a laptop to a server and get nicely packetized screen frames out over the USB host hardware. This is often not clearly communicated...
You can put a USB to RS232C or USB to Ethernet adapter behind the port to then expose ttyS0 or to serve a management webpage, that could happen, but I think the DB-9 and/or RGB would have to stay in that case.
Comments
datacenter guys didn't like digitals. they embrace blurry SVGA pictures coming through excessively long cables and sometimes mechanical switches, and to them DVI/HDMI felt to be an all-or-nothing risk factor
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Server hardware comes with VGA, because everything in the server room (think KVM switches, external remote KVM, local 19" consoles) is built with VGA. And that will be the case as long as server hardware comes with VGA.
I will be very surprised if it doesn't start switching over to USB-C over the next decade or two. Having a single port capable of doing the entire local KVM dance using readily-available hardware is just a no-brainer.
Some switches have already started using USB-C for serial instead of RJ45. When the technician is 100% already carrying a smartphone and C-to-C cable to charge it, making the console available with zero additional adapters is quite attractive.
So, display out from USB-C cable is not display signal over USB 3.x digital signal, it's just an electronic analog patch-through to GPU. The pins in the port actually run raw DisplayPort signals when that feature is activated. So you can't plug a laptop to a server and get nicely packetized screen frames out over the USB host hardware. This is often not clearly communicated...
You can put a USB to RS232C or USB to Ethernet adapter behind the port to then expose ttyS0 or to serve a management webpage, that could happen, but I think the DB-9 and/or RGB would have to stay in that case.