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Thunderbolt just reminds me how "Intel appear to be doing whatever they can to limit application of Thunderbolt to eGPU by making vendors use 25W PCIe slots, instead of 75W or making Thunderbolt enclosures way too expensive. *Appears* to be a company survivalism/profit strategy to prevent migration towards CUDA/OpenCL GPU-based processing instead of Intel's CPU processing."
https://www.techinferno.com/in...
https://www.techinferno.com/in...

Thunderbolt just reminds me how "Intel appear to be doing whatever they can to limit application of Thunderbolt to eGPU by making vendors use 25W PCIe slots, instead of 75W or making Thunderbolt enclosures way too expensive. *Appears* to be a company survivalism/profit strategy to prevent migration towards CUDA/OpenCL GPU-based processing instead of Intel's CPU processing."
https://www.techinferno.com/in...
https://www.techinferno.com/in...

True, that has a been a sore spot for us graphics + game devs + OpenGL guys for a long time.

At least there is eGPU alternative :-/

2013 13" Macbook Pro + GTX970@16Gbps-TB2 (AKiTiO Thunder2) + Win8.1/OSX10.10
* https://www.techinferno.com/in...

I have a "Highpoint Thunderbolt-2 PCIe expansion station", or NA211TB. I got it on Amazon a couple of years back to put a Xilinx FPGA card into, it cost about $400. They've gone up a lot since then though. Last price I saw was ~$850... I'm not sure I would spend that much on an enclosure just for a GPU, but it was worth it for the FPGA card - that was a profitable project :)

The nice thing about the NA211TB is that it comes with a reasonably beefy (300W) PSU built in. There's no need for the ghetto wiring of a big-ass PC PSU into the guts of the PCIe cage to handle the large power requirements of a modern GPU. There's even space for another (single width) card in there...

There's a lot of info on techinferno.com - start at https://www.techinferno.com/in... :)

Simon

Intel has already done the heavy lifting by giving us the Thunderbolt standard that can expose a 40Gbit (or more if you gang connectors) external interface that can transport PCIe to a GPU in a seamless manner.

If AMD wants to work on making the enclosures, cooling, and power supplies more standardized to make plugging in a wide range of GPUs easy then that's great. If they get all NIH and think they can gin up some proprietary connector instead of just using Thunderbolt then you can forget about this entire announcement right now.

For people interested in playing around with eGPU, a list of candidate laptops.

I suspect main reason there is no proper external PCIe is financial. Can you imagine marketing that thing? Here... you can buy a shiny uber brick that runs hotter than a first gen nuclear reactor for $2999.99 .... or you can buy this shitty looking thing for $500 that requires a $300 desktop card and a $40 PSU. If I could get a light system with a decent screen, an i5-6500 and external PCIe with even 8 lanes I would totally pee myself a little... or a lot if it is x16.

Yep. Not to mention Intel is actively blocking eGPU implemntations using Thunderbolt. http://forum.techinferno.com/d...

Here's one set of benchmarks from a guy who did it using a rather indirect way involving a thunderbolt-to-expresscard adapter combined with an expresscard-to-pcie adapter:

http://forum.techinferno.com/d...

And here's a guy who did it more directly using a thunderbolt-to-pcie adapter:

http://forum.techinferno.com/d...

You can see the benchmarks there for yourself. External monitor benchmarks are higher, probably because of the extra copying that has to go on to use the internal monitor. As an example, the first guy on an 11" 2013 macbook air got 69 FPS running Bioshock Infinite on max settings at 1366x768 (versus 15 FPS on the stock iGPU), and the second guy reported running Battlefield 3 on "Ultra" quality at 40FPS at 1920x1080.

Is there a big performance hit from doing all this, including using a dual-core ultrabook-class CPU? Sure, but it's hard to argue that the results aren't playable. It certainly proves the concept, and a properly supported solution at an affordable price could make one hell of an improvement to a notebook docking solution. Having the portability of an ultrabook, but docking it at home to your home monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard/storage/network/etc? That'd be pretty nice. For many people, it might obviate the need to have both a desktop for gaming and a notebook for portability.

Here's one set of benchmarks from a guy who did it using a rather indirect way involving a thunderbolt-to-expresscard adapter combined with an expresscard-to-pcie adapter:

http://forum.techinferno.com/d...

And here's a guy who did it more directly using a thunderbolt-to-pcie adapter:

http://forum.techinferno.com/d...

You can see the benchmarks there for yourself. External monitor benchmarks are higher, probably because of the extra copying that has to go on to use the internal monitor. As an example, the first guy on an 11" 2013 macbook air got 69 FPS running Bioshock Infinite on max settings at 1366x768 (versus 15 FPS on the stock iGPU), and the second guy reported running Battlefield 3 on "Ultra" quality at 40FPS at 1920x1080.

Is there a big performance hit from doing all this, including using a dual-core ultrabook-class CPU? Sure, but it's hard to argue that the results aren't playable. It certainly proves the concept, and a properly supported solution at an affordable price could make one hell of an improvement to a notebook docking solution. Having the portability of an ultrabook, but docking it at home to your home monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard/storage/network/etc? That'd be pretty nice. For many people, it might obviate the need to have both a desktop for gaming and a notebook for portability.

>> Why has Apple chosen not to make a $1000-$1500 desktop that has desktop video cards, RAM and CPUs, and at least 2 HDD bays?
You need to have your geek license confiscated.

They do. Several computers that fit that bill in fact.
One is called a macbook mini (four cores, 16GB RAM, multiple 5Gbit ports for storage and two 10Gbit ports for desktop video cards).
The other is called a macbook air (two i7 cores, 8GB RAM, up to half a terabyte storage, multiple 5Gbit ports for ext storage and 10Gbit port for desktop video cards).

Yes, desktop video cards on Macbook air.
Games just fine on any A-grade title you can find on steam on any resolution you pick between 1920x1200 to 2560x1600.

Yes, really:
http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/2494-macbook-air-11-2012-gtx-660ti-%40-2-2-no-opt.html#post33280

And yes, that macbook comes at well under $1500, and the macbook mini is half that again. Shell out a few hundred on a thunderbolt->PCIe rig, and you're sweet.

So Apple do make EXACTLY what you ask for, even if you lack the tech skills to read a spec sheet, install the right OS and make use of it.

Hardware is no longer an excuse to be using OSX or whatever.
Not because you can multi-boot Linux or Windows on a mac.
Multi-booting is not practical for 99% of what we need to do.
It's because of hypervisor+driverstack products (Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion) that not only run guest OS's fast (we've had virtualisation on the desktop for a while). It's because they integrate guest and host OS to work side-by-side, on one monitor, at the same time, to make a unified experience and allow using software for all environments, at the same time and with virtually no lag.

I use Apple hardware, because it passes the 2-finger test (can lift the machine with 2 fingers at 6AM in the morning), and has enough RAM and PCIe I/O to run a desktop-grade gamebox and outperform the craziest alienware laptop. (yes, really.)

But I work across all OS's, and am running omnifocus on OSX side-by-side with Microsoft Visio on Windows and KDE.

If you're still stuck in a OS1 vs OS2 vs OS3 dillema, you're doing it wrong.