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Wireless PCIe To Enable Remote Graphics Cards
J. Dzhugashvili writes "If you read Slashdot, odds are you already know about WiGig and the 7Gbps wireless networking it promises. The people at Atheros and Wilocity are now working on an interesting application for the spec: wireless PCI Express. In a nutshell, wPCIe enables a PCI Express switch with local and remote components linked by a 60GHz connection. The first applications, which will start sampling next year, will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor. wPCIe works transparently to the operating system, which only sees additional devices connected over PCI Express. And as icing on the cake, wPCie controllers will let you connect to standard Wi-Fi networks, too."
Pci-e x1 is to slow for all of that video will suck at that speed and then you want to add more io to it?
Very short. It has a hard time going through air; walls - forget it.
Not to mention security. I mean, you thought Tempest was bad before, now I can wirelessly sniff and alter PCI traffic, which is a direct conduit into the RAM.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
There have been various ad-hoc solutions to the problem, nothing standardized has yet hit the field, though the PCI-SIG has an initial standard. These guys are representative enough of the sort of products actually available, usually break-out boxes to allow laptops or undersized desktops to run a few more cards. A few more specialized instances, for the laptop market, have consisted of basically your usual docking station; but with a cable that plugs into an expresscard port, rather than a proprietary connector.
It's not that bad -- I've done it before.
X Windows over plain old wifi.
"I imagine it will be impractical for many devices"
You're right, and the summary is wrong and the article's a bit misleading.
"... will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor."
Sorta... PCIe 16x is 16 GB/s, that's with a big B for bytes. They're hoping for 7Gbps, or 875 MB/s. "the spec should move "quickly" to 7Gbps (875MB/s)." That's 1/20th the speed of 16x PCIe. They might be able to do PCIe x1 but that's it.
If they would have read the whitepaper that is all explained:
"A reliable wPCIe connection can be maintained with a relatively low data rate channel. However, to achieve meaningful performance between local and remote devices, the data rate needs to be on the order of 2 Gbps, or that of a single lane of PCIe. The only practical wireless channel that can support this capacity is 60 GHz."
So basically this can transfer wirelessly at ~500+ MB/s, so you can have wireless BD-ROM, wireless hard drives, and yes even wireless displays, since it's fast enough to transfer 1080i without any compression, but I'm sorry to dash the hopes of anyone that thought they could someday upgrade their laptop's video card by simply buying a wireless external Radeon HD 5970 or Geforce GTX 480, you will still need a GPU connected by 16x PCIe to process the video and then stream it similar to what OnLive Remote Gaming Service offers now.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
We've already had external GPUs for laptops. They failed horribly. That is why you don't see them.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And yet, it's all the bandwidth I need to attach a less-powerful video card (such as the Matrox G550, which can run off a PCIe x1 slot) to my laptop, allowing me to dock onto another monitor or two on my desk quickly and easily.
They're talking about using the 60GHz bands, which are heavily limited by line of sight, and have extremely poor to no penetration of physical objects. Those facts make it perfect for this kind of high bandwidth, short range application, without further cluttering the spectrum for those around you.
But you couldn't walk around the house with it. You could walk around the same room. Next room, maybe, but certainly not two rooms over nor even another floor.