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

Posted by timothy on Friday March 4, 2016 @06:00AM 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.

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Re:No one plays games any more by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-04 06:31 · Score: 0, Troll

The new games aren't as good as the games we already own.
Not only that, the big "hail mary" of GPU's (virtual reality), turned out to be so much bunk
After years of development...how many Occulus Rift devices actually sold? 2? maybe 3?
2016 is the year of Linux on the desktop. We don't need fancy GPU's to run a command line.