VESA’s Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a Spec Paves Way For 8K Notebooks, Improved Battery Life

VESA is probably best known for its TV wall mount specifications, but the non-profit standards organization also provides specs for electronics. One of those standards, DisplayPort (DP), is a display interface that competes with the likes of HDMI and DVI. VESA updated the embedded version of DisplayPort, known as eDP, to support higher resolutions, more colors and better refresh rates in mobile devices like laptops and smartphones. 

VESA’s eDP v1.4a is based largely on eDP v1.3, but has some important new features for device manufacturers as they bump up mobile device displays into the 4K category and start looking towards even higher resolutions. eDP v1.4a will even be able to support 8K displays, thanks to a segmented panel architecture known as Multi-SST Operation (MSO). A display with this architecture is broken into two or four segments, each of which supports HBR3 link rates of 8.1 Gbps. 

“The Multi-SST Architecture enables greater design flexibility and power savings in new LCD panel technologies for embedded high resolution displays,” Samsung Display Vice President Bong-Hyun You said in a statement. “Samsung proposed this feature in order to permit panel makers to make even broader usage of the eDP interface in advanced panels, as well as reduce panel thickness, reduce power draw, and reduce cost.”

The updated eDP spec also includes VESA’s Display Stream Compression (DSC) standard v1.1, which can improve battery life in mobile devices. In another effort to conserve battery power, VESA has tweaked its Panel Self Refresh (PSR) feature, which saves power by letting GPUs update portions of a display instead of the entire screen.