Displayport - Compaq 8000 - Elite Convertible Minitower PC Introduction Manual

DisplayPort

In late 2005, another consortium of computer and display electronics manufacturers – HP, Dell, Philips,
NVIDIA, ATI (now AMD), Samsung, and Genesis Microchip – brought a new digital display interface
specification to the Video Electronics Standards Association as a proposed new standard. About a year
later, VESA published the original DisplayPort standard. Since then, the original group of promoters has
expanded to include Intel and Lenovo, and the spec was revised slightly (to the current 1.1 version) to
better enable re-use of existing PCI-Express designs, and to support the Intel HDCP content-protection
system.
DisplayPort differs from the earlier TMDS-based interfaces (such as DVI and HDMI) in several significant
ways. First, it uses a packetized communications protocol, which enables simple support of multiple data
types and other features. Audio may be carried – optionally – along with the digital video information, as
well as other data types (text, etc.), and later versions are expected to use the packetized protocol to
enable support for multiple displays per physical connection, tiling, conditional update, etc., with full
backward compatibility with the original spec. DisplayPort was also designed to be both an external
(monitor, TV, etc.) connection as well as an internal (panel-level) interface, which will permit the
development of such products as direct-drive monitors. Physically, the connector resembles HDMI in size,
but differs in the shape of the shell and the thumb-operated latching mechanism.
DisplayPort source and sink (display) devices may use one, two, or four "lanes" (differential data pairs),
depending on their data rate needs; the interface automatically configures itself to make the best use of
the available capacity. With a full four lanes in use, it provides about 10.8 Gbit/sec. of raw capacity.
The expected DisplayPort 2.0 release (planned for mid 2009) should double this capacity while
maintaining backward compatibility.
Figure 8 DisplayPort Connector
11