The latter. The entire area of vaguely PC peripheral chips died in 2014 when MegaChips took over ST's DP chips.
Consider how much a 10 GbE card still costs -- this is the same speed! Apparently, it's not cheap making chips working with 10-20-40 gigabit/s line speeds but the market demands low cost. USB C wouldn't get far if a plain USB C to DP adapter would cost a hundred bucks.
> Consider how much a 10 GbE card still costs -- this is the same speed! Apparently, it's not cheap making chips working with 10-20-40 gigabit/s line speeds but the market demands low cost. USB C wouldn't get far if a plain USB C to DP adapter would cost a hundred bucks.
You can thank the laws of physics for that because at 10+ gbit data rates you start needing crazy internal clock speeds (which can be significantly higher than the input clocks). Since the distance a signal can travel before it loses too much energy to register logic HIGH is proportional to the wavelength, you have to pack everything close enough while still doing what your specs call for. In the case of 10GigE and USB Type C, this means having to move to smaller fabrication processes than most companies are prepared for or even have access to.
Most protocols designed to be that fast are either massively parallelized to avoid this problem like PCIe/DDR2+ or very expensive to implement as peripherals/silicon like MIPI3/10GigE/USB Type C.
Yes, it seems ten gig is about where the fertilizer hits the circular cooling device. The new 2.5 and 5 gbe cards are much cheaper and DisplayPort 1.2 ICs with the 5.4 gbit HBR2 lane speed are widespread and of course there's USB 3.1 Gen 1 (formerly known as 3.0) with also 5 gbit/s. There is practically nothing working with the DP 1.3 defined HBR3 8.1 Gbit/s lane speed, though.
The only strange thing here is how five years ago we already had USB 3.0 and DP 1.2 devices in abundance but ten gig is still somewhat problematic.
Regardless of industries, you can always assume, as it is always 98% of the cases, that any failure of correction or innovation is because 1) It doesn't improves their bottom line and 2) Anything that involves higher cost budget or lower profits.
That is why we need competitions. Sadly patents also prevent competitions from happening.
