3 ms·

It's been done. The most high profile one was the 2011 Vaio Z, which came with an external GPU that connected to the laptop over Light Peak but with a non-Thund

by jsnell 12y ago

It's been done. The most high profile one was the 2011 Vaio Z, which came with an external GPU that connected to the laptop over Light Peak but with a non-Thunderbolt connector. They killed the Z series a year later. The problem with proprietary solutions for this is that you're not getting the efficiency of scale. Vendor-specific solutions are going to be expensive, there will be a lot of uncertainty about whether you'll be able to upgrade to better GPUs later, and if you want to keep the external GPU but upgrade the laptop you're locked to the same vendor. A widely supported standard solution would be vastly preferable.

alkonaut 12y ago
Yes of course, I don't want some proprietary external VGA brick, I want a docking station with a normal full length PCIe slot and enough power to feed it. That is, the fat AMD or Nvidia graphics card I slot into my PCIe docking station should have no idea it's not sitting in a regular desktop.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  A non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt II, which has double the bandwidth through channel aggregation, or thunderbolt 3 which doubles what 2 was capable of: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#Thunderbolt_2 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#T... Really don't know why they don't want to license external enclosures with ~300w power supplies, space for 3x width cards, and 16x PCI-E (physically) slots that would let you run whatever GPUs you want. It definitely seems like all the pieces are there, and if you could add $50 to the cost of a mid-range laptop to add a Thunderbolt port which would let you connect whatever GPU box to it, it seems like Intel would sell more Thunderbolt licenses and chipsets. Consumers would love the choice of upgradable optional notebook graphics, and you wouldn't need to drop an extra $1000 on a laptop with beefy internal GPUs just to play games that a $600 laptop's CPU could easily handle. I can only assume that they don't do this because it would kill the gaming laptop market and possibly some of the desktop PC market.
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    As long as Thunderbolt is involved there seems there is both the licensing issue and the issue with graphics cards needing Thunderbolt drivers to work in the enclosures. If it was done perfectly, the card would be just like any card in a normal desktop slot, so the normal driver would work. Not sure what would be required for that to work. Also not sure what it would take to just physically run the "on board" PCIe directly to the docking rather than use a cable. It should be much better for latency to just have the card sit in a docking box right under the laptop, within the same distance from the cpu as a normal PCIe card is on a desktop motherboard.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt don't want to license external enclosures These two statements are incompatible.
- justinlloyd 12y ago
  You can purchase external PCI-E enclosures with a PSU that plugs in to Thunderbolt and you can put pretty much any GPU or any other PCI-E card in there. Some enclosures permit you to put two or even three cards inside, though the PSU can be quickly overwhelmed. Plug that in to a modern MBP running Windows 7 or Windows 8 and you suddenly have a Windows laptop with a top of the line NVidia card. I was considering going this route for the past two months but was waiting to see what Razer and Alienware announced at CES and sure enough Alienware updated their entire line of laptops to support eGPU, though the Alienware enclosures AFAICS are primarily for GPUs rather than a general-purpose PCI enclosure.
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    Do you have any links to those? Those I have found only support a few graphics cards and only with special thunderbolt-enabled drivers. I'm looking for something that will run a (any) standard graphics card at full speed with a standard driver, but pretty sure that doesn't exist. EDIT: Found it! http://www.kitguru.net/laptops/anton-shilov/msi-introduces-gs30-laptop-with-pci-express-x16-external-gpu-box/ http://www.kitguru.net/laptops/anton-shilov/msi-introduces-g...

by jsnell 12y ago

alkonaut 12y ago

Yes of course, I don't want some proprietary external VGA brick, I want a docking station with a normal full length PCIe slot and enough power to feed it. That is, the fat AMD or Nvidia graphics card I slot into my PCIe docking station should have no idea it's not sitting in a regular desktop.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
seanp2k2 12y ago
A non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt II, which has double the bandwidth through channel aggregation, or thunderbolt 3 which doubles what 2 was capable of: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#Thunderbolt_2 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#T... Really don't know why they don't want to license external enclosures with ~300w power supplies, space for 3x width cards, and 16x PCI-E (physically) slots that would let you run whatever GPUs you want. It definitely seems like all the pieces are there, and if you could add $50 to the cost of a mid-range laptop to add a Thunderbolt port which would let you connect whatever GPU box to it, it seems like Intel would sell more Thunderbolt licenses and chipsets. Consumers would love the choice of upgradable optional notebook graphics, and you wouldn't need to drop an extra $1000 on a laptop with beefy internal GPUs just to play games that a $600 laptop's CPU could easily handle. I can only assume that they don't do this because it would kill the gaming laptop market and possibly some of the desktop PC market.
- alkonaut 12y ago
  As long as Thunderbolt is involved there seems there is both the licensing issue and the issue with graphics cards needing Thunderbolt drivers to work in the enclosures. If it was done perfectly, the card would be just like any card in a normal desktop slot, so the normal driver would work. Not sure what would be required for that to work. Also not sure what it would take to just physically run the "on board" PCIe directly to the docking rather than use a cable. It should be much better for latency to just have the card sit in a docking box right under the laptop, within the same distance from the cpu as a normal PCIe card is on a desktop motherboard.
- pjc50 12y ago
  non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt don't want to license external enclosures These two statements are incompatible.
justinlloyd 12y ago
You can purchase external PCI-E enclosures with a PSU that plugs in to Thunderbolt and you can put pretty much any GPU or any other PCI-E card in there. Some enclosures permit you to put two or even three cards inside, though the PSU can be quickly overwhelmed. Plug that in to a modern MBP running Windows 7 or Windows 8 and you suddenly have a Windows laptop with a top of the line NVidia card. I was considering going this route for the past two months but was waiting to see what Razer and Alienware announced at CES and sure enough Alienware updated their entire line of laptops to support eGPU, though the Alienware enclosures AFAICS are primarily for GPUs rather than a general-purpose PCI enclosure.
- alkonaut 12y ago
  Do you have any links to those? Those I have found only support a few graphics cards and only with special thunderbolt-enabled drivers. I'm looking for something that will run a (any) standard graphics card at full speed with a standard driver, but pretty sure that doesn't exist. EDIT: Found it! http://www.kitguru.net/laptops/anton-shilov/msi-introduces-gs30-laptop-with-pci-express-x16-external-gpu-box/ http://www.kitguru.net/laptops/anton-shilov/msi-introduces-g...