Lucid Thunderbolt External GPU Demonstrated
Lucid's external graphics solution is bringing back the graphics vision of time long gone.
When Lucid took the wraps off its Thunderbolt External Graphics at the IDF, I could not help but to remember a rather visionary product we discussed here at Tom's Hardware more than six years ago and at least brought it to a virtual design phase.
Back then, we speculated that external graphics based on the ATI R600 graphics core would be testing acceptable power limits and potentially make external graphics boxes a necessity due to their excessive power and cooling requirements. Similar to how we used to bring external floppy and CD-ROM drives along with our notebooks, there was the idea that graphics boxes could be an option for notebook owners. As we know, this vision never became a reality, but the idea is not dead yet.
Lucid now sees an advantage for this technology because of the Thunderbolt interface and often underpowered Ultrabooks that may have enthusiasts wanting more in the graphics department. Their external box integrates an AMD Radeon 6700 chip, which has the potential to improve the graphics performance of a base Ultrabook by a substantial margin.
So, is this technology coming to market? It is a concept right now and far from being a market-ready product. As passionate as we were about external graphics in 2006, it is still much more likely that external graphics would be, if commercially sold, a niche product and not a mainstream solution.
For more details and another video, check out LaptopMag.
ALthough thunderbolt enabled will definitely bring out better performance.
Dual/TRI SLI external cases would be cool though, you could really do a lot to improve cooling and keeping the GPUS separate from everything else heat wise would be an interesting idea. Several cool possibilities with this; you could even share an expensive GPU with someone else in your home and still use your PC while they game. What about consoles having an optional thunderbolt port to use an external GPU would be another neat idea.
Let's just hope this gets cheap. Only issues I see are bandwidth wise on Thunder-Bolt.
Gamers buy Gaming-Laptops, having a better Performance(like Alienware).
Also: isn't a Firewire/USB quite a bottleneck, compared with a fully-integrated Notebook-GPU?
Thunderbolt!
http://bit.ly/PcFJBF
we're talking thunderbolt here, which despite all its apple-tied frustrations is essentially an external PCI-E port, something in the realm of PCI-E 4x? I am sure you could google some more accurate numbers, but it has sufficient throughput to be usefully applied.
TL/DR thunderbolt is fast.
I would jump on one of these in a hurry if they reach the market. I like the small lightweight form factor of ultrabooks for airplanes and chilling on the couch but when I get to a hotel at night I often want the graphics muscle only a giant gaming laptop of doom can give you. This could be the best of both worlds.
Coupled with enough storage, this could actually make the Air quite the semi-mobile photo-editing machine.
I wonder if there are any latency drawbacks with an external graphics card that one wouldn't see with an internal one. It seems like the extra length of cabling wouldn't be able to compare to the few inches between the CPU and GPU on a motherboard.
Thunderbolt combines the PCIe standard with DisplayPort, so it is PCIe.
Eventually the thunderbolt technology will take advantage of optics (its original codename was Lightpeak) and will allow bandwidth limits beyond the current 10GB/s limitation of copper wire.
Thunderbolt will eventually drop in price and become mainstream and will coincide with the USB standard, just will take some time for that to happen and for the prices to drop. Intel has thunderbolt support on Ivy Bridge and all future CPUs will take the tech even further.
It may never be able to stay up to par with full x16 PCIe standards in terms of bandwidth, it will provide more than adequate for mid range solutions (and anyone looking to get a high-end graphics solution anyway should be considering a full desktop at that point)
After looking through bookmarks I found the original Tom's article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vidock-expresscard-graphics,1933.html
Here is the website of the company that makes the products:
http://www.villagetronic.com/vidock/index.html
http://www.jessebandersen.com/2010/11/vidock-4-unbox-hardware-setup-software.html
The main question in mind I think everyone else has is gaming.... YES it seems to be an excellent option for people who have a crappy gpu in their laptops.
USB has a fraction of the bandwidth, much higher latency, is a bursty interface, and is far more reliant on the CPU than PCIe. It would be one of the least ideal configurations possible.