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

by Joshua Gulick — Thursday, February 12, 2015, 12:30 PM EDT

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.

Embedded Display Port will make 8K possible on laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices.

“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.

Tags: Samsung, DisplayPort, VESA, 8k, edp

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.