nVidia Announces MXM for Notebooks
Giant_Panda writes "NVIDIA just announced a new mobile graphics interface for PCI Express based
notebooks (PR here).
NVIDIA is calling the interface MXM (Mobile PCI eXpress Module),
and they seem to have the support of the Taiwanese notebook ODMs on this one. HotHardware has a few pictures and details on the technology - it looks like MXM is a royalty-free standard too, so other mobile GPU
manufactures like ATi may even make MXM modules. (More MXM Info -
HardOCP,
Tweaktown)"
Mmmm... Maxim with notebooks... wait, huh? What the hell? I clicked on the "few pictures and details" links and all it comes up with are shots of freaking computers!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
MXM looks exactly like AlienWares Do-It-Yourself Upgradeable Mobile Graphics Technology.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
This would be sweet on a machine with MMX running XMMS.
"Nvidia said it had already won the backing of Far Eastern ODMs like Quanta, Wistron, FIC, Uniwill, Clevo, AOpen, Tatung, Arima, Asustek and Mitac, all of whom have said they will offer MXM-based notebooks. Since these ten already account for many of the world's name and no-name notebooks, MXM is likely to grow by stealth, becoming a de facto standard."
You can already do this (big red letters on this page).
Mini-PCI is an open standard, just like PCI. You even buy the specifications from the same place, the PCI SIG. What nVidia is doing is pre-empting what the PCI SIG will eventually come out with, perhaps in the hopes that the PCI SIG will adopt their standard as the official PCI graphics standard for laptops.
If a couple of big players like Dell and Toshiba adopt it for their notebooks, this will most likely become the standard.
Someone else on this thread added that CardBus does exactly what you are asking for. I would also like to add that audio capabilities should be absorbed into the video card anyway so that you can send it a single datastream and get both video and audio out, so you don't need to add audio capabilities to the bus.