8 ms·

AMD wants to standardize the external GPU

92 points by davidiach 11y ago

geerlingguy 11y ago
I've been hearing this will happen ever since the first MacBooks started to be released with Thunderbolt; it seems the market for those who would actually buy an expensive external card/enclosure would already be fairly limited (if you need something on a desktop, why not just a separate highly optimized gaming rig?), and on top of that, it sounds like AMD is planning on adding yet another new external adapter/standard, and not leveraging Thunderbolt 2 or USB C. Sounds like yet another flash in the pan to me. VR could be a killer feature, of course, and price would determine the success, but unless they use a standard connector and don't require all manufacturers to add in yet another display/bus to the thin laptops, I don't see this going anywhere.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  Also I think the thin laptops are a big part of the problem with the PC industry. They are trying so hard to compete with phones they aren't doing anything to improve performance. Back in the day you could buy a new PC every 2 years and get a big performance boost, today that is not so. Get a cheap netbook and put in an SSD and you'll get something that feels more responsive than an i7 machine saddled with a mechanical drive. No wonder people are not buying PCs. I remember when Tom's hardware used to be interesting but for a long time they have been colonized by this "power efficiency" thing which is really bogus because you can work really hard to power optimize your machine and then some stupid flash ad makes your CPU spin at 100% and it is all for nought. People buy things because of product attributes they can feel, not because of attributes which require careful measurement under controlled conditions
  - ant6n 11y ago
    I can physically feel if my fan is spinning. Getting a couple of points more in some benchmark I can not feel. I prefer quiet.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      Also, even though I loved fanless, low heat electronics. The lack of noise (or even LEDs) disturbs me. I liked these communication sidechannels.
    - PaulHoule 11y ago
      Water cooling.
      - rglullis 11y ago
        It was a painful and costly (+$150) lesson for me to learn that most of the watercooling systems are actually louder than standard fans. A few years ago I built a pretty awesome-looking, water-cooling machine, and just the noise of the water pump was louder than anything I had before. The fans I needed to the radiator also were just as loud as my previous GPU fan.
        seanp2k2 11y ago
        Yeah, big air cooling has come a long way. My i5-2500k on a stable 4.5ghz with 2 Radeons is nearly silent (thanks Antec Sonata + extra acoustic damping sheets inside). It's hard to beat a NH-D15 these days, and phase change is an order of magnitude more costly.
  - yoodenvranx 11y ago
    I have an old-ish Celeron CPU with 2.6 GHz which costs about 35$ a few years back. I still use it as my main PC and it is more than fine for every task (except video encoding and compiling large projects). I was thinking about upgrading but it just does not make any sense to invest money in this. Instead I am going to buy a better monitor this year.
  - sp332 11y ago
    Including SSDs, often by default, is improving performance. Most laptops also come with way more RAM than they did just a few years ago. And the newer 6th-gen Core processors are faster than say 3rd-gen and much more power-efficient. A laptop with a charge left is infinitely faster than one with a flat battery!
    - PaulHoule 11y ago
      Hell yeah. If Microsoft, at some point, said that you couldn't put a windows 10 or 11 sticker on a machine that has a mechanical C: drive, everybody would be saying that this version of Windows is awesomely faster than anything they've seen before.
  - zurn 11y ago
    Discrete GPUs just aren't of any use to the vast majority of people.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    I would much rather have a laptop that can get through a full 16 hour day when necessary than one that was twice as fast.
    - teacup50 11y ago
      I'd much rather not have a laptop (for work). Study after study have shown that screen real estate and system performance improve our work output, let us use more of our working memory for task-critical state, etc. If you need portability, then sure, laptops are necessary trade-off so that you can get any work done at all. However, that's all they are: a trade-off. It's a shame if we're only optimizing for use cases that are ultimately regressive.
      - rayiner 11y ago
        Most of the time, I use my laptop docked to two large monitors. But even still, I value the ability to take it unplugged for 12+ hours at a time when I'm travelling much more than I would value it being faster.
        seanp2k2 11y ago
        This, and this is why I loved the 17" MBP. I'd love a 19" rMBP with 4K or even native QHD screen, dedicated graphics, two SSDs (M.2 would be fine), lots of fast IO ports, and an all-day battery. I don't care how thin it is. It would spend most of the time docked to 2 or 3 external 4K displays for "real work", but then come with me to meetings and on trips. The only thing that comes close right now is a Thinkpad P70. Can get it with 64GB ECC RAM, Xeon E3-1505m, 4K 17" screen, 2 SSDs + 1 HDD, and a Quadro M5000M. The only problem is that it can't run OSX in some supported fashion, and the battery life likely isn't great. Sad that Apple has been falling short in the professional market for a while now and they expect everyone to be happy with thinner & lighter.
        teacup50 11y ago
        Why not both? I have a few laptops, and a high-end desktop; I get the best possible performance when I'm working at a desk, and acceptable performance when I'm traveling.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    posting this from a Chromebook C720P running gentoo linux on a custom hard drive. Cost $350 for a fast PC with 8 hours of battery life.
- nailer 11y ago
  I did a huge bunch of research on eGPUs before I gave up and purchased a PC: the main issue (18 months ago) is that Intel won't certify any of the Thunderbolt eGPUs since they don't have OS X drivers, as part of Intel's agreement with Apple. Both Asus and another company had tech ready to go, but they couldn't get permission to release them from Intel.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Surely the main issue 18 months ago was that Intel simply didn't support eGPU on TB2, whereas they do officially support it on TB3?
  - mikhailt 11y ago
    Intel formally announced support for eGPUs when they revealed TB3. Everyone can do eGPUs now via USB-C that uses TB3 via alt mod protocol. Razor was the first one to support this a few months ago with their Blade ultrabook. Sadly, they are behind with releasing the eGPU case but their case can by used on any laptop that has TB3 and as long as the manufacturer has not disabled some stuff for TB3 via the bios. If Asus have it ready, then where is it?
    - Roritharr 11y ago
      Since i need a Type-C Dockingstation anyhow for my next Notebook (probably XPS 13 or 15) i'm quite intrigued by the idea of a eGPU Case (Razer Core most likely), since its going to be a piece of kit that i can use over multiple generations of notebooks AND graphics cards, instead of buying the Dell TB 15 Dock which may or may not be working on any non-dell machine. 2x4k at 60hz from a 13 inch PC is finally becoming feasible.
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      Yeah. It's ridiculous that it's taking this long, since the problem of "make PCI-E available outside of the case" has been solved in various forms for a few years now. I know it's not QUITE that simple, but it sounds like it has more political challenges than engineering challenges for the past while.
- jdietrich 11y ago
  As mentioned in the article, several manufacturers have developed their own proprietary external GPU systems. The market might not be huge, but it definitely exists. AMD have been fairly good at providing open source software and freely licensed standards, certainly much better than Nvidia. Their adaptive frame rate technology is royalty-free, they have an MIT-licensed middleware platform for games and GPGPU programming, and they are the main backer of Vulkan.
  - yohui 11y ago
    But Thunderbolt 3 already exists, and both Intel and Nvidia support it. Intel does not have any discrete GPUs of their own, of course, but they did open up Thunderbolt 3 to external GPUs. Nvidia drivers have already been updated to support external GPUs over Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 external GPU enclosures are still rare, but products such as the Razer Core are on the way and should work with any laptop that supports Thunderbolt 3, of which there are a growing number. There should be nothing stopping AMD from supporting eGPU enclosures via Thunderbolt 3. I'm honestly perplexed why they think we need yet another competing standard.
- alva 11y ago
  I would not be surprised if this was to get more of a grip on the VR market in the future. Consider that Oculus have stated the current Mac family cannot be supported due to their built in GPUs being insufficiently powerful and non replaceable [1]. So possibly a long play on VR taking off, wanting to provide support to Macs and stopping dominance by Nvidia. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijyBMpm2bqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijyBMpm2bqQ
anonymfus 11y ago
It's interesting that USB Type-C specification itself has an example of PCI Express docking solution, "5.1.4 Example Alternate Mode – USB/PCIe Dock", page 168.
Quequau 11y ago
I really hope this goes further than DockPort Plus.
dogma1138 11y ago
The title is quite misleading ;) There has been already a standard for about a decade and it's called PCI Express :) I had an external GPU setup about 8 years ago using the ExpressCard slot which worked at 1.6Gbit/s at the time (about 1/4th of what PCIe(1) X16 offered, but still more than enough for even upper mid-range GPU's of the day). Since ThunberBolt came out you could run external GPU's without any issues or even performance bottlenecks. The PCIe(3.0) x4 on TB3 these days offers more bandwidth than PCIe(2.0) x16 does and it's more than enough to saturate any high end GPU on the market today or in the foreseeable future. Intel with IRIS and other IGP's and MSFT through DX12 and WDDM improvements support pretty much GPU hotswap which make this a plug and play setup (historically if you wanted to use an external GPU you had to do a full system reboot to initiate it). But this the main problem for AMD atm, Thunderbolt and pretty much the entire eco-system for external GPU's today is based on Intel techonlogy, AMD has yet to implement TB or managed to create a competitor to it and it has tried and failed twice already - LightingBolt which was later re-branded and redesigned as DockPort. So if AMD want to support external GPU's all they need to do is bite the bullet and implement TB at the cost of their pride and some royalty fees, but as it seems now all they want to do is get some PR and then abandon the project complaining about market monopoly like they've done quite a few times in the past. Shame what have became of AMD, I loved them in the Athlon x64 days, too bad they tried to play dirty early on and then got fixated on the same tech they had without capitalizing on their market success to push it forward, they thought they can play the same game as Intel and they failed, poorly. AMD's playbook is leading them to a dead end, at this point i hope they'll spin off their GPU department into a separate company that might get back on the right path that ATI has been going towards (which oddly enough also hit a dead end because they were too "cool" to play ball after their meteoric rise during the R300 vs GeforeFX days). But hey Ars seems to like rooting for the "underdog" even when it doesn't deserve it, but at least the amount of fanboyism in comment section made me laugh a bit.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  What do you want them to do? Create an open alternative? They tried that and failed. Implement thunderbolt? Sorry, that's Intel proprietary, no can do. It's not just a matter of license fees. AFAICT, Intel won't even let anybody else create chips for cables or peripherals, let alone host chips.
mrbill 11y ago
Surely I can't be the only person who remembers the old HP/Apollo PA/RISC workstations that had external framebuffers/GPUs that "stacked" with the main system chassis and had their own interface cables, power supplies, cooling, etc...
transfire 11y ago
Not sure I really get the point unless they start building the GPUs into monitors/TVs.
scentoni 11y ago
How about the Alienware Graphics Amplifier? http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/alienware-graphics-amplifier http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/ali...
- gshulegaard 11y ago
  Which requires a custom connector/port. AMD aims to create a standard. From the article: > On the other hand, AMD has tried to standardise the external GPU before—and failed miserably. In 2008 AMD launched its XGH external graphics standard, which essentially just took the pins from PCIe slot and passed them through to an external connector (a solution copied by Alienware for its Graphics Amplifier). This was a smart idea at the time, particularly as USB 2.0 and ExpressCard didn't offer anywhere near the amount of bandwidth required for a high-end GPU. Unfortunately, very few laptop manufacturers used XGH, with Fujitsu Siemens' Graphics Booster being one of the rare commercial examples.
sand500 11y ago
I would love to have a thin and light laptop as my daily driver that I can plug into a Desktop dock with a GPU for when I want to game.

92 points by davidiach 11y ago

I've been hearing this will happen ever since the first MacBooks started to be released with Thunderbolt; it seems the market for those who would actually buy an expensive external card/enclosure would already be fairly limited (if you need something on a desktop, why not just a separate highly optimized gaming rig?), and on top of that, it sounds like AMD is planning on adding yet another new external adapter/standard, and not leveraging Thunderbolt 2 or USB C. Sounds like yet another flash in the pan to me. VR could be a killer feature, of course, and price would determine the success, but unless they use a standard connector and don't require all manufacturers to add in yet another display/bus to the thin laptops, I don't see this going anywhere.

PaulHoule 11y ago
Also I think the thin laptops are a big part of the problem with the PC industry. They are trying so hard to compete with phones they aren't doing anything to improve performance. Back in the day you could buy a new PC every 2 years and get a big performance boost, today that is not so. Get a cheap netbook and put in an SSD and you'll get something that feels more responsive than an i7 machine saddled with a mechanical drive. No wonder people are not buying PCs. I remember when Tom's hardware used to be interesting but for a long time they have been colonized by this "power efficiency" thing which is really bogus because you can work really hard to power optimize your machine and then some stupid flash ad makes your CPU spin at 100% and it is all for nought. People buy things because of product attributes they can feel, not because of attributes which require careful measurement under controlled conditions
- ant6n 11y ago
  I can physically feel if my fan is spinning. Getting a couple of points more in some benchmark I can not feel. I prefer quiet.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Also, even though I loved fanless, low heat electronics. The lack of noise (or even LEDs) disturbs me. I liked these communication sidechannels.
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    Water cooling.
    - rglullis 11y ago
      It was a painful and costly (+$150) lesson for me to learn that most of the watercooling systems are actually louder than standard fans. A few years ago I built a pretty awesome-looking, water-cooling machine, and just the noise of the water pump was louder than anything I had before. The fans I needed to the radiator also were just as loud as my previous GPU fan.
      - seanp2k2 11y ago
        Yeah, big air cooling has come a long way. My i5-2500k on a stable 4.5ghz with 2 Radeons is nearly silent (thanks Antec Sonata + extra acoustic damping sheets inside). It's hard to beat a NH-D15 these days, and phase change is an order of magnitude more costly.
- yoodenvranx 11y ago
  I have an old-ish Celeron CPU with 2.6 GHz which costs about 35$ a few years back. I still use it as my main PC and it is more than fine for every task (except video encoding and compiling large projects). I was thinking about upgrading but it just does not make any sense to invest money in this. Instead I am going to buy a better monitor this year.
- sp332 11y ago
  Including SSDs, often by default, is improving performance. Most laptops also come with way more RAM than they did just a few years ago. And the newer 6th-gen Core processors are faster than say 3rd-gen and much more power-efficient. A laptop with a charge left is infinitely faster than one with a flat battery!
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    Hell yeah. If Microsoft, at some point, said that you couldn't put a windows 10 or 11 sticker on a machine that has a mechanical C: drive, everybody would be saying that this version of Windows is awesomely faster than anything they've seen before.
- zurn 11y ago
  Discrete GPUs just aren't of any use to the vast majority of people.
- rayiner 11y ago
  I would much rather have a laptop that can get through a full 16 hour day when necessary than one that was twice as fast.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    I'd much rather not have a laptop (for work). Study after study have shown that screen real estate and system performance improve our work output, let us use more of our working memory for task-critical state, etc. If you need portability, then sure, laptops are necessary trade-off so that you can get any work done at all. However, that's all they are: a trade-off. It's a shame if we're only optimizing for use cases that are ultimately regressive.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      Most of the time, I use my laptop docked to two large monitors. But even still, I value the ability to take it unplugged for 12+ hours at a time when I'm travelling much more than I would value it being faster.
      - seanp2k2 11y ago
        This, and this is why I loved the 17" MBP. I'd love a 19" rMBP with 4K or even native QHD screen, dedicated graphics, two SSDs (M.2 would be fine), lots of fast IO ports, and an all-day battery. I don't care how thin it is. It would spend most of the time docked to 2 or 3 external 4K displays for "real work", but then come with me to meetings and on trips. The only thing that comes close right now is a Thinkpad P70. Can get it with 64GB ECC RAM, Xeon E3-1505m, 4K 17" screen, 2 SSDs + 1 HDD, and a Quadro M5000M. The only problem is that it can't run OSX in some supported fashion, and the battery life likely isn't great. Sad that Apple has been falling short in the professional market for a while now and they expect everyone to be happy with thinner & lighter.
      - teacup50 11y ago
        Why not both? I have a few laptops, and a high-end desktop; I get the best possible performance when I'm working at a desk, and acceptable performance when I'm traveling.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  posting this from a Chromebook C720P running gentoo linux on a custom hard drive. Cost $350 for a fast PC with 8 hours of battery life.
nailer 11y ago
I did a huge bunch of research on eGPUs before I gave up and purchased a PC: the main issue (18 months ago) is that Intel won't certify any of the Thunderbolt eGPUs since they don't have OS X drivers, as part of Intel's agreement with Apple. Both Asus and another company had tech ready to go, but they couldn't get permission to release them from Intel.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Surely the main issue 18 months ago was that Intel simply didn't support eGPU on TB2, whereas they do officially support it on TB3?
- mikhailt 11y ago
  Intel formally announced support for eGPUs when they revealed TB3. Everyone can do eGPUs now via USB-C that uses TB3 via alt mod protocol. Razor was the first one to support this a few months ago with their Blade ultrabook. Sadly, they are behind with releasing the eGPU case but their case can by used on any laptop that has TB3 and as long as the manufacturer has not disabled some stuff for TB3 via the bios. If Asus have it ready, then where is it?
  - Roritharr 11y ago
    Since i need a Type-C Dockingstation anyhow for my next Notebook (probably XPS 13 or 15) i'm quite intrigued by the idea of a eGPU Case (Razer Core most likely), since its going to be a piece of kit that i can use over multiple generations of notebooks AND graphics cards, instead of buying the Dell TB 15 Dock which may or may not be working on any non-dell machine. 2x4k at 60hz from a 13 inch PC is finally becoming feasible.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Yeah. It's ridiculous that it's taking this long, since the problem of "make PCI-E available outside of the case" has been solved in various forms for a few years now. I know it's not QUITE that simple, but it sounds like it has more political challenges than engineering challenges for the past while.
jdietrich 11y ago
As mentioned in the article, several manufacturers have developed their own proprietary external GPU systems. The market might not be huge, but it definitely exists. AMD have been fairly good at providing open source software and freely licensed standards, certainly much better than Nvidia. Their adaptive frame rate technology is royalty-free, they have an MIT-licensed middleware platform for games and GPGPU programming, and they are the main backer of Vulkan.
- yohui 11y ago
  But Thunderbolt 3 already exists, and both Intel and Nvidia support it. Intel does not have any discrete GPUs of their own, of course, but they did open up Thunderbolt 3 to external GPUs. Nvidia drivers have already been updated to support external GPUs over Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 external GPU enclosures are still rare, but products such as the Razer Core are on the way and should work with any laptop that supports Thunderbolt 3, of which there are a growing number. There should be nothing stopping AMD from supporting eGPU enclosures via Thunderbolt 3. I'm honestly perplexed why they think we need yet another competing standard.
alva 11y ago
I would not be surprised if this was to get more of a grip on the VR market in the future. Consider that Oculus have stated the current Mac family cannot be supported due to their built in GPUs being insufficiently powerful and non replaceable [1]. So possibly a long play on VR taking off, wanting to provide support to Macs and stopping dominance by Nvidia. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijyBMpm2bqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijyBMpm2bqQ

anonymfus 11y ago

It's interesting that USB Type-C specification itself has an example of PCI Express docking solution, "5.1.4 Example Alternate Mode – USB/PCIe Dock", page 168.

Quequau 11y ago

I really hope this goes further than DockPort Plus.

dogma1138 11y ago

The title is quite misleading ;) There has been already a standard for about a decade and it's called PCI Express :) I had an external GPU setup about 8 years ago using the ExpressCard slot which worked at 1.6Gbit/s at the time (about 1/4th of what PCIe(1) X16 offered, but still more than enough for even upper mid-range GPU's of the day). Since ThunberBolt came out you could run external GPU's without any issues or even performance bottlenecks. The PCIe(3.0) x4 on TB3 these days offers more bandwidth than PCIe(2.0) x16 does and it's more than enough to saturate any high end GPU on the market today or in the foreseeable future. Intel with IRIS and other IGP's and MSFT through DX12 and WDDM improvements support pretty much GPU hotswap which make this a plug and play setup (historically if you wanted to use an external GPU you had to do a full system reboot to initiate it). But this the main problem for AMD atm, Thunderbolt and pretty much the entire eco-system for external GPU's today is based on Intel techonlogy, AMD has yet to implement TB or managed to create a competitor to it and it has tried and failed twice already - LightingBolt which was later re-branded and redesigned as DockPort. So if AMD want to support external GPU's all they need to do is bite the bullet and implement TB at the cost of their pride and some royalty fees, but as it seems now all they want to do is get some PR and then abandon the project complaining about market monopoly like they've done quite a few times in the past. Shame what have became of AMD, I loved them in the Athlon x64 days, too bad they tried to play dirty early on and then got fixated on the same tech they had without capitalizing on their market success to push it forward, they thought they can play the same game as Intel and they failed, poorly. AMD's playbook is leading them to a dead end, at this point i hope they'll spin off their GPU department into a separate company that might get back on the right path that ATI has been going towards (which oddly enough also hit a dead end because they were too "cool" to play ball after their meteoric rise during the R300 vs GeforeFX days). But hey Ars seems to like rooting for the "underdog" even when it doesn't deserve it, but at least the amount of fanboyism in comment section made me laugh a bit.

bryanlarsen 11y ago
What do you want them to do? Create an open alternative? They tried that and failed. Implement thunderbolt? Sorry, that's Intel proprietary, no can do. It's not just a matter of license fees. AFAICT, Intel won't even let anybody else create chips for cables or peripherals, let alone host chips.

mrbill 11y ago

Surely I can't be the only person who remembers the old HP/Apollo PA/RISC workstations that had external framebuffers/GPUs that "stacked" with the main system chassis and had their own interface cables, power supplies, cooling, etc...

transfire 11y ago

Not sure I really get the point unless they start building the GPUs into monitors/TVs.

scentoni 11y ago

How about the Alienware Graphics Amplifier? http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/alienware-graphics-amplifier http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/ali...

gshulegaard 11y ago
Which requires a custom connector/port. AMD aims to create a standard. From the article: > On the other hand, AMD has tried to standardise the external GPU before—and failed miserably. In 2008 AMD launched its XGH external graphics standard, which essentially just took the pins from PCIe slot and passed them through to an external connector (a solution copied by Alienware for its Graphics Amplifier). This was a smart idea at the time, particularly as USB 2.0 and ExpressCard didn't offer anywhere near the amount of bandwidth required for a high-end GPU. Unfortunately, very few laptop manufacturers used XGH, with Fujitsu Siemens' Graphics Booster being one of the rare commercial examples.

sand500 11y ago

I would love to have a thin and light laptop as my daily driver that I can plug into a Desktop dock with a GPU for when I want to game.