[heavily re-edited from its initial post thanks to comments from an anonymous person and Kyle Gordon]
I was having a conversation with someone in my lab the other evening about alternatives to DVI for video plugs. This stemmed from the fact that I wanted a DVI cable to hook up to the LCD I got for the lab. This was a slight issue because not even was using laptops or desktops with DVI ports and thus the location of the DVI cables were unknown. So, do any pre-existing port types have the bandwidth needed for an LCD so that a new port type does not need to be invented?
Let's first look at what is required for my dream LCD. Dell's 30" LCD has a WQXGA resolution of 2560 x 1600 (4.1 megapixels) at 60 Hz. With each pixel requiring 8 bit colour depth per channel (and there are three: red, green, and blue), that means the LCD needs pixels x depth x refresh = (2560 * 1600) * 24 * 60 = 5,898,240,000 bps ~= 5.9 Gbps.
That is a lot of required bandwidth. As of right now a dual-link DVI-D cable is needed to drive either Dell's 30" LCD or Apple's 30" LCD. Luckily my PowerBook has the connector for it. But not everyone does. Plus the cable does not designed to support things such as audio like HDMI is (which is spec'ed at 5 Gbps and is designed for a universal cable for both video and audio for HDTV).
The only connection type I know of that can handle 5.9 Gbps or better is 10 Gb ethernet, but I don't think they are about to start using that for video displays. Luckily they are working on a new connection called UDI to be the next-generation version of DVI with 15 Gbps. Unfortunately it won't support audio either, which means the dream of cutting down on the cables needed for my Mac mini/high-res LCD home theatre setup might need a few more cables than I would like.
