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

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.

Comments

Use Thunderbolt or forget it AMD

[CajunArson]

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.

Re:Use Thunderbolt or forget it AMD

[PPalmgren]

Of the companies I'd worry about making a proprietary connector, AMD isn't one of them. AMD tends to make open standards that can be used on either companies' GPUs without licensing requirements or proprietary hardware. However, if they did make one, I fully expect that NVidia would not use it and make their own implementation.

Re:No one plays games any more

[kamapuaa]

They've sold 20 million XBox One. Your getting the wrong conclusions from your evidence. From 1982-2012, sales went first away from mom&pop stores, and then towards online purchases.

Also, I think you've just gotten older. You get sentimental over games from when you were a kid...Kids don't play Quake anymore, of course they could. The game is dated, the model has been improved upon.

Developers need to embrace external buses

[quibbler]

Thunderbolt 3 is fierce and could do it. The issue is always market, even with standardization.
Meanwhile we have morons like Palmer Luckey attacking Apple; basically the kingmaker in pushing to market modular, externalized resources like Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C.

Re: No one plays games any more

[NominalLoss]

That is the dumbest thing I ever heard. Minecraft made Notch millions long before it was ever ported to a console. Kerbal Space Program. Your "group" must be cloistered dopes or you don't listen very well.