
AMD wants to standardize the external GPU - davidiach
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/amd-wants-to-standardise-the-external-gpu/
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geerlingguy
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
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

~~~
rayiner
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.

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teacup50
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
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.

~~~
teacup50
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.

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rayiner
It's a pain keeping multiple computers in sync. And my laptop is a 2.7GHz Core
i7 with 20GB of RAM that's more than fast enough for anything I do.

~~~
teacup50
It's really not a pain; just update the SCM working copy.

If your project has tendrils into the local system, that's the real problem to
fix, because it's going to introduce pointless inefficiency at every level:
new developer setup, production deployment, support for enterprise-
installation, and ... inability to use the ideal hardware. available.

Performance translates directly into working efficiency. There's no such thing
as "fast enough", there's only "too expensive".

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dogma1138
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.

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bryanlarsen
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.

~~~
dogma1138
Yes because they can't either develop their own controller or say implement
the one from say Texas Instruments?

All they need to do is have a TB controller and have a free PCIe interconnect,
from looking at say the Promontory chipset (AMD's answer to Intel's PCH) you
can just drop it in without sweating.

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wmf
Thunderbolt controller chips are only made by Intel and AMD is too proud to
tell PC vendors to put an Intel chip in every AMD laptop.

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dogma1138
What is this for then?
[http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/tps22985_thunderbolt/?DCMP=sc...](http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/tps22985_thunderbolt/?DCMP=scblog&HQS=hval-
hvl-apl-thunderbolt-awire-20140326-lp-en)

~~~
wmf
Those are little 50-cent chips that sit next to the real Thunderbolt
controller (a small grey box in the diagram) which is only made by Intel.

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anonymfus
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.

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

~~~
gshulegaard
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.

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mrbill
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...

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sand500
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.

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

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Quequau
I really hope this goes further than DockPort Plus.

