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AMD Wants To Standardize the External GPU (arstechnica.com)

Posted by timothy on from the arrange-the-contacts-in-a-smiley-face dept.

Soulskill writes: In a recent Facebook post, AMD's Robert Hallock hinted that the company is working on a standardized solution for external GPUs. When people are looking to buy laptops, they often want light, portable machines — but smaller devices often don't have the horsepower to effectively run games. Hallock says, "External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardized connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc." The article points out that the Thunderbolt 3 connector already (kinda) solves this problem, providing up to 40Gbps of bandwidth over a single connector. Still, I find external GPUs intriguing. I like the idea of having a light laptop when I'm moving around, but a capable one when I sit down at home to play a game. It'd also be nice to grab my desktop's GPU when I want to game on my laptop in the living room. Standardization may turn out to be important for GPU-makers if VR ends up taking off. The hardware requirements for those devices are fairly steep, and it'd facilitate adoption if graphics power was more easily expandable.

1 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Hipsters/Millennials ruined gaming. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I think that it's Hipsters/Millennials who have ruined gaming.

    Since they've started getting involved with the industry, we've seen games go from being fun and innovative, like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and SimCity were, to being dull, unplayable shitfests that aren't worth our time.

    Worse, these Hipsters/Millennials have taken gaming from something that was enjoyable and turned it into a political shitshow with their social justice shenanigans.

    This has happened to all of the software that Hipsters/Millennials have gotten involved with.

    Their awful ideas and UI "designs" have ruined or tarnished Firefox, GNOME, Windows, iOS, OS X, most web sites, and numerous other software products.

    They've also chosen to use the worst programming languages around, including JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Rust. Now we get to deal with the shitty, slow and unmaintainable code they've written. Since they're so "trendy", they move on to the next fad quickly, forcing everyone else to fix the broken shit they've left behind.

    I don't know much about the next generation, but I sure as hell hope that they're able to undo all of the damage that the Hipsters/Millennials have managed to do in such a short time.