How does the cpu/gpu tell each individual lcd in a monitor to do? And how does it understand without 2.1M+ wires?

Question

How does the cpu/gpu tell each individual lcd in a monitor to do? And how does it understand without 2.1M+ wires?

In: 3

Answer 1

The trick is called “multiplexer”

It’s basically a junction of wires, a single wire splits into many and the multiplexer makes sure that only one of the channels is open at a time. So you send all the pixels in sequence and every time one is read the multiplexer switches to the next channel.

A multiplexer is basically a tree structure of left/right junctions, so a binary number can easily tell wich output should be active. 10111011 would basically mean signal goes left/right/left/left/left/right/left/left. With these 8 switch stages you can already reach 2^8 =256 different outputs. So for 2.1M outputs you need about 21 stages because 2^21 =2,097,152