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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."
To those in the know, why will this succeed where UWB/wireless USB failed in the market?
Remote graphics seems like an even more esoteric need than the remote mass storage, printing, cameras that UWB would have offered?
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We'll soon have ONE MORE wireless signal to keep track of, when all those we already have work so well together!
Then it won't make a sound.
You'd better get used to your computer experience looking like thaaaaaaaaat if your display has to be sennnnnnnnt over a wireless linnnnnk.
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?
The best feature of this proposed standard is that if you place a ceramic mug directly between your CPU and the external graphic processor, it will keep your (coffee, soup or whatever) steaming hot, all day long! Those days of long WoW raids with only cold beverages and snacks are over!
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I will admit some incredulity when I read the title. "Wireless what?!"
Very cool stuff if it materializes.
Imagine a small lightweight machine with say an ULV i3 or i5 CPU, small-ish screen and weak-ass integrated graphics. Place the machine on it's docking pad (No connectors to get bent or boards to break) and suddenly it's got (wireless?) juice and access to kick-ass graphics, and a big monitor, as well as whatever else is in the base-station.
A desktop replacement that remains light and portable for road warriors, with none of the fragility associated with docking connectors. With those transmissions speeds I presume this is going to be a point-blank range affair, so snooping shouldn't be (much?) of a problem.
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.
Some recent systems have IOMMUs which provide privilege separate between hardware devices much like normal MMUs govern software. However, unless this sort of IOMMU device is active, PCI and PCIe hardware is generally capable of transferring data to or from any other connected device, including any area of system RAM. Sometime this can even extend to external interfaces; for example, people have been known to take advantage of the DMA capabilities of the Firewire protocol to read the contents of RAM on an active system.
In general, non-hotpluggable hardware has been granted the same level of trust as the OS kernel, so no one worried very much about it. IOMMUs were more about protecting against faulty or corrupted software (device drivers) than malicious hardware. However, more and more hardware is hotpluggable these days. Also, some software interfaces are becoming too complex to really trust—consider, for example, the interface to a modern GPU, which must transfer data to and from RAM, and perhaps other GPUs, under the control of code provided by user-level application software (shaders, GPGPU). Without an IOMMU it is up to the driver software to prove that such code is perfectly safe, which is an inherently hard problem.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It's not that bad -- I've done it before.
X Windows over plain old wifi.
Let's say I've got even a little building with 50 people who want to use this. Will I be able to pack 50 of these point-to-point units into a building and have all of these systems perform at peak capacity without stepping all over each other? That would be amazing.
And, aside from the technical issues of getting it to work well in a dense environment, there's still one cord that needs to be connected to the laptop. Power. If I have to plug that in, I may as well snap the laptop into a docking station and skip the wireless connection entirely. One connection is one connection and I won't have to worry about interference, security, bandwidth, etc.
You're unlikely to be able to *alter* PCI traffic, though you could perhaps *insert* PCI traffic.
Still, people figured out properly encrypting wireless links some time ago. Tempest is primarily interesting because the signals you're looking at are unintentional (and often unknown) side effects and they often deal with links that are impossible or unreasonable to encrypt.
"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
What are the possibilities of channel bonding, though? WiFi has 11 channels, is it possible to build a sender/receiver pair that can move data over multiple channels at once? Perhaps soon there will be 7Gbit, then 14Gbit, then 21Gbit, etc implementations. Need more bandwidth? Add more radios.
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.
Wait, so you're saying they'll be able to send a continuous color video stream THROUGH THE AIRWAVES??? Wow, that's so incredible! I bet they wish they'd had this technology back in the middle of the last century...
True, but consider this possibility:
Right now everyone's looking at the traditional model. That is, a portable CPU connected to a GPU connected to a display, and adding in a wireless form factor to it.
What if, instead, the base station contained the CPU AND the GPU connected directly together - much like a desktop system now - to do all the hard math and 3D rendering? - which then outputs a wireless PCIe signal, which is then picked up by the portable device, like a netbook, with a basic GPU, a small processor, and little to no HD space? It's only job would be, much like a thin client - would be to provide you access to the computing power in the "main" section of the house.
It would be like having a docking station for your netbook that turns it into a desktop powerhouse - only you could walk around the house with it. And, when the time comes that you want to take it outside, you still have the basic capabilities of a netbook.
That might be a product worth selling to, say, a family of four. "You can pay for four notebooks, or four netbooks and this powerful base station".
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
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.