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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.

2 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Use Thunderbolt or forget it AMD by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  2. Re:Soulskill, didn't you get canned as a /. editor by Soulskill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When BizX bought Slashdot, they brought only a portion of the existing Slashdot staff with them. That included one of the three editors and one of the four engineers. I'm not sure about the other departments. I'd guess they intended to fill those roles with people from their own organization, but I don't know anything about how they're going about it.

    I never met or talked with any of the BizX folks, so I can't tell you much more than that. We editors were the bottom of the decision-making totem pole for the site, so I didn't know about the acquisition until it was done.

    Even if I'm no longer affiliated, I still love the site and the community. I'll keep contributing until I see good reason not to.

    Yes, I've found another job -- I start on Monday, actually. Really looking forward to it. :)