External Thunderbolt Graphics Card On Its Way 207
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing — but faster. The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop — and more importantly you need to carry around a second monitor to actually use a ViDock. So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?"
HP dv7 (Score:3, Informative)
So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?
It's not exactly a gaming laptop... but it does have a Core i7 2ghz CPU, Radeon HD 6770M 1GB, 8GB of RAM, and a 17.3" LCD... Oh and when I get bored of gaming it also came with a BD-ROM.
Costco has them for $999 and I bought two :)
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You were ripped off.
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What's the use case? (Score:2)
And machine with Thunderbolt already has a modern GPU, because it's integrated with the display port. Or they've added a Thunderbolt card to an old machine, but if they can add expansion cards then they can add a new GPU.
The new MacBook Pro already supports chaining two displays from the port, and I doubt this will be a very unusual feature for devices with Thunderbolt. I suppose this might be useful for adding a third one, but then you're really pushing the available bandwidth.
Woosh! (Score:3, Interesting)
You've completely missed the point. Don't think MacBook Pro, think the new Thunderbolt equipped MacBook Airs that lack a decent built in graphics card.
And to answer the summary's closing question: because it means I can carry an ultra-portable (MacBook Air) when I travel and plug it in at home to give it a much needed graphics boost for use at home.
Re:Woosh! (Score:4, Informative)
"And to answer the summary's closing question: because it means I can carry an ultra-portable (MacBook Air) when I travel and plug it in at home to give it a much needed graphics boost for use at home."
Sure, that would be great - but Apple crippled the MBA with a downsized Thunderbolt port. http://www.slashgear.com/macbook-air-gets-half-power-thunderbolt-29168292/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+slashgear+(SlashGear) [slashgear.com]
If the thing can't even handle two external screens, I doubt it'll handle an external screen and an external graphics card...
Your argument makes no sense. (Score:2)
I'm not really sure how you manage to get from "[it] can't even handle two external screens" to "It [won't] handle ... an external graphics card".
I don't believe the former could you lead you to conclude the latter,
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Hmmm, I suppose you're right. Just saying, with Apple's track record: It wouldn't surprise me if there was some magical compatibility issue...
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That doesn't seem to be directly related. The main issue is that a 16x PCIe 2.1 slot - what you'll find on most motherboards - can transfer 8 GB/s (64 Gbit/s). Thunderbird can do 10 Gbit/s, and that probably includes the 8/10b encoding so the comparable number is 8 Gbit/s. Any real high-end graphics card will probably starve. As for the outputs, wouldn't you then naturally use the additional outputs on the card? I don't see much sense in sending anything but the laptop screen - if in use at all - back to th
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Any real high-end graphics card will probably starve.
Actually, afaik GPUs are very rarely limited by the bandwidth of a 4x PCIe slot, nevermind 8x or 16x. You have to be doing some very specific things to actually take advantage of a 16x PCIe slot.
You very rarely need to transfer data on the order of 8GB/s to/from the GPU... most of what goes across the PCIe bus is just commands, not data. That's why your DVI/HDMI/Displayport is on the back of the graphics card, and not on mainboard; your CPU doesn't need to know much about the results of the GPU calculatio
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"As for the outputs, wouldn't you then naturally use the additional outputs on the card? I don't see much sense in sending anything but the laptop screen - if in use at all - back to the laptop."
True, there's not much sense in it - but that's a good question for someone in the know: Do outputs on an external Thunderbolt graphics card require any additional bandwidth on the "root" Thunderbolt port?
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Do outputs on an external Thunderbolt graphics card require any additional bandwidth on the "root" Thunderbolt port?
That's kind of an odd question. If you didn't put the outputs on the external card then you would have to send your data for display back over the "root" port, which would consume a huge amount of bandwidth. So compared to that, using external ports consumes far less bandwidth.
Are you asking does it use more of the ports bandwidth than an external graphics card which has no external outputs and doesn't send output back to the host (ie it has no output)? In that case... presumably yes, external ports woul
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If the thing can't even handle two external screens, I doubt it'll handle an external screen and an external graphics card...
The "lite" thunderbolt chip on the Airs has zero practical consequences: The limitation on external screens ultimately comes from the on-CPU Intel HD Graphics which only support one DisplayPort and a maximum of two displays (including the built-in screen). The 13" MB Pro has the same limitation for the same reason.
The full-fat Thunderbolt chip supports a second physical Thunderbolt port (but only the iMac actually uses this) and can carry a second DisplayPort signal (only useful on the machines with Radeo
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"The limitation on external screens ultimately comes from the on-CPU Intel HD Graphics which only support one DisplayPort and a maximum of two displays (including the built-in screen)."
Do you have a source for this? Even Intel's 4500MHD (back from the last Core2Duo mobile generation) was already capable of pushing two screens of 1080p, or possibly even one at 2560x1600 and another at 1080p at the same time (need to get my hands on one of the bigger screens to find out). I doubt that the latest gen is incapa
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I doubt that the latest gen is incapable of driving two external displays
Intel HD graphics can support a maximum of two simultaneous displays total (http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-031040.htm#11). One internal laptop display + one external display = two displays.
Maybe Apple could have designed the MacBook so that it could blank the internal display and drive two external monitors (but also bear in mind that the number of monitors which support displayport daisy-chaining can be counted on the fingers of a boxing glove).
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Given Intel integrated GPUs in laptops were capable of driving a couple of 27" LCDs over displayport 2-3 years ago, I find that difficult to believe.
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Given Intel integrated GPUs in laptops were capable of driving a couple of 27" LCDs over displayport 2-3 years ago, I find that difficult to believe.
I think the "one display port" may have been a brainfart on my part, but the bottom line is that the chipset can only support two simultaneous displays.
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I'm thinking this will be very handy for film crews. there are already external PCI-E video card boxes for film crews to render and compress video on site.. Was reading some blogs from a film crew using the RED camera's, talking about their process..
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All the bench marks show the intel integrated graphics are signigficantly worse than the NVIDIA discrete graphics chip in the previous generation of MacBook Air.
So no, by modern standards, the intel graphics solution that's built into the cpu is still pretty dreadful. Intel have never managed to make a competetive gpu and that's still the case today.
As the graphics card will be at the far end of the thunderbolt connector (ie the display end) I don't see the problem.
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Actually the benchmarks show that the 2011's are pretty much on par with the 2010's, within 3-4 FPS. I wouldn't call that significant.
http://lowendmac.com/bookrev/11br/0805.html [lowendmac.com]
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/intel-integrated-graphics-not-hampering-sandy-bridge-macs.ars [arstechnica.com]
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Intel HD graphics has full video acceleration. I was running a Core i3 with integrated video for a while that ran full 1080p 264 video without breaking a sweat.
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> Intel's GPUs are shit, and still choke on any complex video files
Do you have benchmarks backing this up? You can look up HD graphics benchmarks for video decoding and see they are about on-par with low end nVidia and ATI graphics cards. I've never heard of or seen "complex" video files degrading under DXVA acceleration.
I know of quite a few people using Intel HD graphics in home theater setups with no problems at all, using both windows media center and MythTV.
Re:Woosh! (Score:4, Interesting)
The vast majority of stuff you might want a GPU to do, is not bandwidth-limited. Numerous tech sites have shown that in most cases, the difference in performance between a GPU on a x16 PCIe bus and a x4 PCIe bus is nothing, and even a x1 PCIe bus doesn't suffer much.
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>A slightly weaker GPU on a fast interface is going to beat a fast one that's spending 90% of its time waiting for data over the bus.
No it wont. Just check older Vidock expansion products that used ExpressCard slot (×1 PCIe)
example http://www.jessebandersen.com/2010/11/vidock-4-unbox-hardware-setup-software.html [jessebandersen.com]
Even with x1 pci-e you blow out of the water all the mobile garbage that is put into paltops.
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Modern, yes. Fast, not necessarily. the 13" MacBook Pro uses only the intel integrated graphics, which... while much improved in sandy bridge, don't hold a candle to a real graphics card.
For me, a laptop that's thin, light, portable, but can be used to play games on and/or to do graphics work when I get home would be perfect. This dock (combined with a MacBook Pro 13 or MacBook Air) seems to fit the bill dead on.
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For me, a laptop that's thin, light, portable, but can be used to play games on
If it's games you want, any laptop will run an NES emulator, even an Atom netbook.
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Also think the cheaper new Mac Mini's that are running Intel graphics. This could be used at least for more video outputs if not better graphics performance.
"So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?" (Score:5, Interesting)
For docking stations and such. Plenty of us plop our laptop onto a docking station or a USB hub + monitor + speakers + keyboard + mouse anyway.
It beats the hell out of hauling an overpriced 10-pound beast to the same office desk every day, when you can just keep better equipment (with better ergonomics) neatly arranged and haul a lighter machine to/from work.
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This is a little bit off-topic, but does anybody know if there's a Thunderbolt docking station in the pipeline, from any manufacturer?
The MacBook Air + Thunderbolt Display combination has piqued my interest, because it provides a relatively full array of ports when plugged in. But I don't need an external monitor, just the docking station, and I've got no desire to splash £899 on a monitor that I don't want or need.
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Still. Why bother? This box is intended to do something other than what your so-called portable machine can manage. At that point, why bother with having the other box be a dumb peripheral. Just let it be an entirely separate machine. Clearly it doesn't need to be portable. So it can be anything. It doesn't need to be tied to any particular flawed way of doing things.
In truth, a discarded Windows laptop with "no resale value" makes more sense for the typical home use case being described here.
So would any r
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This. I'm interested because I have had a number of occasions where I needed a PCIe bus and chassis to test something in the field.
Now if someone came out with a general purpose I/O board based on something similar to a Virtex-5 FPGA that can communicate using thunderbolt (and USB 2.0/3.0) then I would most definitely purchase one.
68000: What's old is new again (Score:2)
it has an ATI 68000 inside the CPU
My Sega Genesis also has a 68000 inside the CPU [wikipedia.org]. What's old is new again.
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I wrote a DirectX 3* game many years ago as a test platform.
Most of the accelerator features available on PC platform at the time were either useless or not reliably available from system to system, so it generally just requested a surface and drew things manually (aside from background blits).
I still fire it up for fun every once in a while (yes, it still runs under Windows 7/64, despite being written for Windows 95, unlike 99% of the so-called "AAA" titles which crash and burn with each and every minor un
No bandwidth limiting yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop
For multi-GPU systems in current desktops at least, there's little to no performance penalty going from 16x to 4x [googleusercontent.com].
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Thunderbolt isn't 4x PCIe 2.0 though (Score:2)
Intel says the PCIe part of Thunderbolt is 10gbits/sec which would make it 2x PCIe 2.0. PCIe 2.0 is 500MB/sec per lane, using 8b/10b encoding so 5gbits/sec raw data rate.
It has a 4x connection to the chipset, but that doesn't mean it has 4x worth of bandwidth out.
2x is going to hamstring high end graphics cards some.
I'm not saying it is unworkable, but there are limits to the performance you'll get because of the interface, particularly considering graphics cards are only going to use more and more bandwidt
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The test has been redone: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/25.html [techpowerup.com] and things haven't really changed.
Keep in mind that PCI-E 2.0 doubles bandwidth though, making todays 1x yesterdays 2x.
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Not trying to initiate a debate here, but are recent games really tailored to higher resolutions? Seems like most consumers are only running 1080p displays. Since so many games are developed with consoles in mind, I'd think the resolutions would be bound to what the consoles are connecting to, which is also 1080p.
I miss the days of high resolution gaming....
Seth
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So long as the GPU has adequate local memory, there is no reason why 4 lanes would not be enough. All of the processing happens locally - unlike a cheap GPU that shares system memory and would be effected by reduced PCIe bandwidth.
Now it might be beneficial for such external GPUs to include even more memory. This way the game can include additional data on the GPU thereby removing any delays that might result from the GPU needing to access system memory. Minimize the amount of textures being sent over
Mac SCSI display (Score:2)
I remember it (for the really early Macs), Wikipedia mentions it (no footnote), and I have an old SCSI spec' for it (and SCSI Ethernet) around somewhere.
Sounds like more of the same. Connect a general-purpose interface to a box with some limited resource (no I/O slots in the original Mac, and only a few dedicated mass storage slots in most current portables) and there will be someone to use the GP interface to run a display.
Not a bad idea, just not terribly original.
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Thunderbolt is PCIe and "DisplayPort" over wires/fiber. That's not really "other protocols", except that, of course, PCIe can carry the traffic for any sort of adapter, just as it does inside a desktop/laptop.
Firewire, BTW, as well as USB handle networking natively, although IP over Firewire is more robust than the relatively new USB-IP.
There already ARE PCIeUSB 3.0 bridges. Thunderbolt is just PCIe, so, no, it doesn't have USB protocol over the Thunderbolt wires, which is why it needs the bridge.
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AFAIK, you could ostensibly pass arbitrary protocols in a Thunderbolt packet. The fact that TB currently only provides for two standard packet types (DisplayPort data and PCIe) doesn't inherently prevent a USB packet type.
Gaming + laptop = contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't understand the purpose of a high end gaming laptop. It's always quite more expensive than the equivalent desktop; and ultimately you're playing with a small screen, a cramped keyboard, and an imprecise pointing device, in a far less comfortable way... unless you plug the laptop to an external screen, keyboard, and mouse, so what was the point of a portable anyway?
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Most of the time my laptop moves between the office and my home. Once in a while, I want to play a game (or two) and for quite obvious reasons, I don't want a gaming rig (ugliness and space).
I'd rather have a small device I connect between my laptop and my screen (external screen both at home and at work) for when I need to play.
Point of a portable? Being able to use it as a portable computer MOST of the time.
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A laptop is much more convenient to take to a LAN party than a desktop.
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What is this "LAN party" you speak of? Gamers getting together in one place? Sounds so 90's...
I'd hate to live in a world that's so isolating that friends and family members never visit one another.
Re:Gaming + laptop = contradiction (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to think this. Then, by chance, my workplace bought me one. I'd specified nothing more than "Must have Intel chip, more than one core, and an nVidia graphics card" - for convenience, compatibility with my existing disk images, etc. and to suit all the tasks I do during the average work day.
I ended up with an MSI gaming laptop - my workplace didn't even realise that the rucksack and mouse it came with were anything more than "freebies" even though the mouse was one of those stupidly expensive ones that has multiple DPI modes, weights for balance and all sorts of other shite (but, hell, it's a very good mouse).
They didn't even care that the WASD keys were highlighted or that it had all sorts of gaming features like a touch-button to overclock both processor and graphics (2 year warranty not applicable...). Apparently it was a super-cheap deal and even now I can't get the same laptop or any equivalent for even half the price they paid for it.
I have to say - it's been wonderful. I've always had a dedicated "games" machine in the past and never had the money for this sort of laptop and probably would never have bought it for myself. I threw 300 Steam games at it and it laughed at every single one (I've always played the defaults that games offer but now I can actually ramp up to maximum easily).
It has a huge screen that, even as up close as being laptop-range, you can really appreciate every pixel. It does HD video like I was asking it to add 2+2. The processor laughs at my Eclipse platform and compiles take no time at all. I've never NEEDED to press the overclock button for any reason, ever, at all. It has all the usual gadgets (webcam, bluetooth, wifi, even an "eco" button) and some more unusual (e.g. an external wifi antenna port!).
It has a huge (full) keyboard that's ideal for typing AND gaming. It has a solid aluminium construction that has so far suffered more and survived better than any other laptop I've ever seen in my life (and has a custom-designed backpack to carry it in that holds more weight that I ever thought a backpack like that could). The sound is amazing and the first full 7.1 setup I've ever owned (hell, I've never bothered to have anything but stereo before - and this is WITHOUT having to plug any speakers in) and it's the LOUDEST laptop I've ever heard (you can easily watch a DVD on a crowded noisy airplane, or in a room with the TV on, and hear every word - and the positional audio does still work in those circumstances.
I would never have touched this laptop in a million years, much preferring two or three more ordinary ones instead. But now I'm trying to find this EXACT laptop again for myself at a decent price. It's really changed the way I used my computer and I use the laptop exclusively now. There's nothing better than having a machine that you can use all day at work for menial tasks and then have that same machine at home to play anything you throw at it, and take the same machine with you on holiday and have it do everything you need/want while you're away too.
Plus, gaming laptops have huge advantages in terms of some basic specifications - big GPU's that you just don't get on business laptops, great for video encoding - large amounts of RAM, big screens, every port imaginable, full keyboards that you can get to every key easily, and a lot of money spent on making it feel "right" and solid. I can type on this laptop all day long, go home and type on it for hours, and then take it on the road and type on it for even longer and not fatigue. Even the mouse is the most comfortable that I've ever used.
I would never pay what I see as the gaming premium (similar to the wedding premium - a £5 cake suddenly costs £50) but a single gaming laptop changed it for me. It's not like this is even a model that *pretends* to be gaming while actually being general purpose - the WASD are marked and everything about it says "gaming laptop". But it laughs at everything you throw at it because, compared to a to
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So what model laptop is it? It's kinda funny you spent the whole post raving about the thing, without ever mentioning anything more than the make.
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Somebody mod down, Letter M next to laptop GPU model number means 1-3 models lower than advertised.
6770M = 6670
5770M = 5570
680M = downclocked 560
and so on
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None of which changes the fact that for 99% of what a gamer does, a gamer's laptop is perfectly sufficient and for others it's virtually 100% sufficient.
I don't even KNOW the model number of my particular chipset off-by-heart (nor it's desktop equivalent) but, TBH, I don't care - it runs everything I throw at it.
Bigger screen than a DS (Score:2)
I just don't understand the purpose of a high end gaming laptop.
I can see two reasons. For one thing, unlike a desktop PC, a laptop can play video games while on an airplane or a Greyhound bus. For another, Chris Mattern mentioned LAN parties. (These wouldn't be quite as necessary if more PC games supported split-screen co-op, but that's a discussion for a different day.)
and ultimately you're playing with a small screen
It's far bigger than both screens of a Nintendo DS put together, or even a 3DS.
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People who are fanatical gamers but also have a job where they are on the road a lot?
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Indeed. If you want to play games on a laptop, stick to old games. You don't need a massive battery draining testicle frying battery for old games. And they're still just as much fun as they were 10 years ago.
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Actually, many newer, more portable gaming laptops come with power saving features that will shut down cores and either run the GPU in a low power mode or run a separate low power GPU (like an integrated one). My brother's small Alienware (an older version of the M14x - not sure if the model is the same) gets about 5-6 hours of battery life. He also owns a behemoth M17x that gets about an hour, though - and yes, he has more money than he knows what to do with because he isn't even a gamer - he mainly likes
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Get a wireless mouse and use the arm of the couch or the cushion next to you as a mouse pad surface. I used to do that all the time in my Lazy Boy recliner with my laptop.
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Get a wireless mouse and use the arm of the couch or the cushion next to you as a mouse pad surface. I used to do that all the time in my Lazy Boy recliner with my laptop.
In that case get a desktop case and leave it by the television set. Cheaper by far, and you can still use it for things other than games (Movies?)
So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop? (Score:3, Insightful)
They are bloody heavy and expensive. And when you drop it in an airport... :sob: (x-Alienware laptop owner).
This seams like an interesting idea, get a mid-range laptop (£500 will get you an i5 with a smallish screen) and then add this and a nice big monitor for home use. That way I can get a the odd game of TF2 and about and get my work done while out and about, but get home and play something a little more taxing.
Mythtv low res app? (Score:2)
The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop
My recent interest is hardware mpeg decoding to low resolutions like 1080 HDTV (I haven't owned a computer monitor smaller than 1600x1200 since the 90s, so HDTV does seem low res to me, both absolute res and especially by DPI).
I'm curious if "something like this" would have enough horsepower to be a mythtv frontend. My gut level guess is, "probably yeah". I love my mythtv system...
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I'm curious if "something like this" would have enough horsepower to be a mythtv frontend. My gut level guess is, "probably yeah". I love my mythtv system...
Well the mythtv wiki seems to think that the Intel HD 2000 and 3000 on the new Core iSeries is sufficient [mythtv.org] for it. That is without VAAPI support which is scheduled right now for 0.25.
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The key limiting factor here is whether the GPU of your choice is supported (and fully so).
Thunderbolt == Docking port (Score:2)
Take a look at their new Thunderbolt display. With one cable connection, your MacBook gets network, sound, firewire, USB and power(!), all via your external Display. No need to attach a second cable.
Considering that Thunderbolt already is a DisplayPort connection, I don't see the benefit of connection a second graphics card over the PCI-e con
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With one cable connection, your MacBook gets network, sound, firewire, USB and power(!), all via your external Display. No need to attach a second cable.
No power. That is supplied through, eh, a second cable.
What does Intel GMA stand for? (Score:2)
I don't see the benefit of connection a second graphics card over the PCI-e connection.
If you've ever tried to game on an Intel "Graphics My Ass", you would.
Been there, vapored that. (Score:2)
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yeah - me too - unfortunately from what was reported, the Vista/Windows 7 driver model killed it (my guess is the hardware GUI code that was added doesn't allow graphics to be directed along the USB2 bus, but I don't think Thunderbolt will have that issue because it interconnects with the same bus that graphics cards use).
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ViDock has been selling XG clone product for almost 5 years now.
Here's your potential application. (Score:2)
I don't know if it can be fitted with an NVIDIA GPU board or not, but if it can...
CUDA.
Imagine a BitCoin mining rig with a few of these, and there's your application.
The world doesn't revolve around games (Score:2)
The problem (that is oh-so-common in the anti-Apple crowd) is that the world doesn't revolve around PC gaming. Many need to get past the belief that the only thing people care about is how many frames per second they can get in a game - and how small that part of the market really is.
This isn't about games, it's about getting real work done. And that is something that an external Thunderbolt GPU would be good for - when you're at the office, you plug in the GPU, and do your video editing and encoding using
Re:Thunderbolt = dead in two years. (Score:5, Funny)
Please use the correct syntax (Score:2)
You forgot the tag.
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It originally said : "you forgot the <sarcasm> tag" but /. considered it a true XML tag and stripped it.
I didn't use HTML entities.
I should have used the preview button.
Redundant (Score:3)
For hundreds of years written English managed perfectly well without having to sign-post everything with tags.
I certainly got the sarcasm inherent in the gp's post, indeed it was more effective without the silly sign-posting.
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For hundreds of years the English language wasn't exposed to people who could respond to writers instantly in public forums.
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I'm confused. Are you being sarcastic, or instructing us in the finer use of non-compliant HTML tags?
Re:Thunderbolt = dead in two years. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thunderbolt is protocol agnostic. It's not meant to compete with USB, but express card. In fact you can run USB devices over thunderbolt.
Re:Thunderbolt = dead in two years. (Score:4, Informative)
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Thunderbolt is protocol agnostic.
No, it carries displayport and PCIe data. The protocol is very well defined.
In fact you can run USB devices over thunderbolt.
Provided that you wire in a PCIe -> USB chip on the other end. But it seems you can bridge any generic transport to any other, given sufficient will. Did you know you can get a USB to ISA bridge, for instance? It's even supported under Linux!
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You can get a USB->Amiga 1200 clockport bridge too.
The clock port is a little 22 pin header on Amiga 1200s (low end Amiga 'keyboard computer') that allow a realtime clock to be installed inexpensively.
Third party manufacturers have made USB controllers for it... amongst other things. You definitely can bridge transports with enough will! Even ones with 4 address lines and 8 data lines hooked up to D16 through D23 of a 32-bit data bus.
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I was exhausted last night. I meant to say that it's incredibly bridgable not protocol agnostic.
But my point stands, it's meant to compete with ExpressCard, which also is another means of breaking out PCIe lanes. Thunderbolt is not meant to compete with USB.
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One RAID box? Their are several now, Lacie released one a couple of weeks back. Apple also have their Thunderbolt display [apple.com], you might want to look at what it does.
Thunderbolt is not competing against USB either.
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As someone else has already pointed out, it is not a competitor to USB.
As to the RAID box, well, something has to be first. But there are already three others I'm aware of:
There is already also a Sony laptop with a Thunderbolt connector to docking station which has an optical drive, a graphics chip, *and* USB 2.0 and 3.0 sockets. The newer Apple monitors, as well as the new iMacs, use it for USB and DisplayPort. The laptops with it can use a powered-down iMac as a monitor. You can't do a lot of that with U
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So Apple and Sony are backing it.... sign me up
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Thunderbolt is a PCIe bus on a cable. USB isn't even playing the same game, let alone in the same league.
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"Anybody else think thunderbolt is a technology looking for a solution?
USB is cheaper, almost as fast, and ubiquitous. There are probably literally millions of USB devices that work with a USB port."
I don't think you understanding the difference between TB and USB. TB is meant to replace PCIe, HDMI, SATA, etc. Just wait for the teamable 40gbit optical version that's coming out in a few years.
Let me ask you this hypothetical situation. Imagine you have a computer 10 years from now, it has no PCIe slots or a
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It would stupid because there's more then enough cables in a desktop already. If anything, we need LESS of cable solutions and more slots. Look up at what's missing inside laptops in comparison to desktops. Yeah.
Grandparent is exactly correct. This is a technology looking for a solution, or more correctly for a problem to fix. Because there simply isn't one at the moment.
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> If anything, we need LESS of cable solutions and more slots.
'Cause that's what consumers are looking for, great big huge desktops with loads of slots. That's what's filling the aisles at Best Buy.
No, the majority of consumers want tiny, unobtrusive PC's that they have to mess with as little as possible.
> Look up at what's missing inside laptops in comparison to desktops.
Uh-huh. That's why nobody buys laptops. Oh wait, laptops are almost more popular than desktops these days. If only there was some technology that would bring PCIe level expandability to laptops without eating up a bunch of space like ExpressCard...
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You may want to engage your brain and re-read my post. You're repeating my argument.
external pci-e is in the works and does not have t (Score:4, Informative)
external pci-e is in the works and does not have the over head at Thunderbolt has and will not be Intel locked.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/look-out-thunderbolt-external-pci-express-spec-being-developed/6220 [zdnet.com]
http://www.molex.com/molex/products/family?key=external_pci_express_pcie&channel=products&chanName=family&pageTitle=Introduction [molex.com]
http://www.andovercg.com/datasheets/molex-74546-0813.pdf [andovercg.com]
Thunderbolt may be good for external HDD's and other high data stuff. But for PCI-e add in cards and video cards better to go with pci-e also the mac's with on board video have like 8-12 unused pci-e lanes any ways so why not run a video card off of them as 1 video card just maxes out the Thunderbolt bus and still does not let it hit it's full power. Maybe in 2013 you can have a mac mini with a good cpu and a pci-e box with a good video card in it.
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Actually, I think that USB 3.0 is a technology in search of a solution. The only thing USB 3.0 does better than 2.0 is move large quantities of data. This pretty much means that its utility is limited to storage devices such as hard drives, SSDs, etc. (Printers are already served much better by Ethernet, IMO, and most other devices don't need that much bandwidth.)
For storage purposes, eSATA utterly spanks USB 3.0 because of the lower
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The question is not of Apple being innovative, which they wouldn't be; but whether Apple will, through force of just deciding that this is the new baseline, create a market large enough that such expansion gear won't be obscure, expensive specialty hardware...
Since Thunderbolt is an Intel technology I would say that it isn't being driven by Apple exclusively. That was the problem with the ATI and nVidia products getting traction. I think there is now a Sony Vaio Z laptop that has Thunderbolt and a dock. As for expensive, initial hardware will be until there is more competition.
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Apple should simply integrate a modern GPU in their monitors: there's room to properly cool down and the monitor becomes the definitve docking station. It would also justify the price, even if it's slightly increased.
They do: it's called an iMac. They throw in a CPU and a hard drive, too.
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I R'd TFA, and it seems that calling it an external graphics card is actually a bit misleading. It's basically a breakout box that turns the PCIe channel in Thunderbolt into a dedicated PCIe slot. This is a lot more interesting, because it means that you can plug any PCIe card into it, not just a graphics card. Thunderbolt's PCIe looks just like normal PCIe to the rest of the kernel, so you should be able to use any card that you have drivers for. If you're transferring a lot of data, you'll notice the