Sony Vaio Z Has External Radeon Light Peak GPU

not bad....now put the gpu inside the machine...you can do it

Way cool. I've been waiting for some to make a way to add an external video card to a laptop. If AMD's APU line makes it way onto more laptop however, this won't really be needed.

13 inch screen? Thats torture, unless you are an eagle

love it!

The whole point is to make it thin, then have GPU power back at home if you so choose.

I don't know why they haven't done this much earlier. Use desktop grade GPUs in external inclosures, and have them run off of a separate power supply. Create a link a method to output the device so no motherboard attachment is needed, and there you go.


It would work for upgrades, temporary gaming and for desktops that lack the PSU.

If it wasn't the fact that gigabyte already had something close to this about 1.5 years ago, i would be more impressed.

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/pr [...] id=3233#kf

As for you whysobluepandabear, both this old model and it's succesor have desktop grade gpu's. Although neither are mind blowing for there times.

http://computingforever.com/archives/2634

Although i do like the idea of a docking station with a gpu in it for games and gpgpu intensive stuff while having IGP for battery life on the road.

Pricing will be interesting. The PMD will be bottlenecked by the Radeon which is rather anemic for gaming. Maybe you can buy a high-end desktop GPU for the price of the PMD.

But hey, this is a start.

It looks like Gigabyte has 3 US distributors, none of which I have heard of. Never even new they made laptops. Laptops have been offering graphics slots in docking stations for at least 10 years, not just 1.5. I worked with a Compaq that had a dock with multiple PCI slots that we put video cards in just fine.

Why the f did they put such a simple GPU in it? Put a desktop-grade GPU in it like a 6950 or 6970! Such a waste at the moment

You know, that's actually a pretty good idea. You may be onto something. Integrated solutions are good enough for desktop usage but for gaming you usually need to plug it in (meaning you're not mobile anymore). A good quad core should be enough for a couple of external GPU upgrades every year and half or so.

Problem 1: Price) For the 2 to 3 thousand dollars I could buy both a laptop and desktop, both of which would perform better than the above.
Problem 2: Upgrade) Ask yourself why people don't have combination TV/DVD or TV/BlueRay devices. They don't make sense because they tie one technology to another when the advances in each of these techs move at a different rate.
Problem 3: Repairs) Ask yourself why people don't have combination toaster/blenders. Because when one half of the unit breaks, you have to repair the whole thing, replace the whole thing, or just use the part that still works and replace the broken part with a stand alone unit, which you should have bought in the first place.

This is a great idea but I would be more interested if a non-proprietary Laptop Docking Station were developed by PCI-SIG or the group of companies that developed USB.

Future Laptops from ANY manufacturer that are 'Universal Laptop Docking Station Compatible' could be connected to any one of a wide range of Docking Station's from ANY manufacturer, with the possibility of boosting not only GPU performance but CPU / RAM etc etc.

I need a laptop that can run photoshop on the road, so having to carry around 2 pieces to make it work is completely pointless. It is another piece from someone to steal.

And quite honestly, what is that thing than an over priced $3000 tablet, I can get a tablet for $499, and then transfer the files to my pc.

Quite a notebook. Unfortunately the price is too steep, as always in case of 'exclusive' new hardware, while competition comes up with models just little less powerful but far more affordable.

burnley14
The IGP on Llano is nearly as powerful as that HD6650 (IGP HD6620G). Bothe of the have the same specs with the 400SP. This is total failure, Llano proved this intel setups are failure. You dont this bizarra patches.

The same notebook with Llano saves space with the same power. You just add the bd drive and make it a bit more ticker for it.

This reminds me people attaching a horse to a car.

At last there is an external VGA solution, but the price tag is very high.

They were talking about this more than 6 years ago. There was talk of using laptops' pcmcia slots, connected over a pci-express bus, to allow external upgrades to a laptop's video capabilities. I honestly dont know if it actually happened somewhere in the world. This was right around the same time they started releasing external sound cards for usb / pcmcia.

I agree with dash dot dash guy. Our economy depends on stuff breaking or having to be replaced / upgraded often.

13" is a very good size for ultra portable laptops. It's just a bit bigger than a paper document (A4 or US letter or whatever) and will fit perfectly into briefcases or bags big enough for documents/folders.
It's big enough to work on comfortably and small enough to be ultra portable.

btw: Just 2 grand starting price? Wasn't the last gen. Vaio Z the wrong side of 2.5grand?
Do they still offer "RAID"-0 SSDs? *drool*

so you know, current pci-e isnt even saturated, in fact there is negligible difference between 4x and 16x, which is about 8x on the original which would be 2 GB/s get multiple light peak cables (2-4) and there you go.

the gpu isnt all about pci-e bandwidth, its also about processing what comes into it, which it does really fast, so even if the bandwidth is slower, you still benefit from newer cards.

Oh, very potent. In fact its like the product from MSI in previous years (the graphics card dock) but much, much more refined and increased in power. I'd totally love to have this one.

I doubt Light Peak has the bandwidth to sustain higher end cards. I believe the bandwidth of LP is equivalent to PCI-E x4. True most video cards cannot saturate a full x16 pipe, but x4 is probably easy to saturate with a high end card.

good stuff from Sony. wish the price becomes more bearable, spending that much on a laptop somehow just isn't appealing...

That is impressive!