Is there anything other than thunderbolt planned?

Hello,
Thunderbolt is still slow, just 4x. And they probably gonna milk us again
with Thunderbolt v2 featuring all new multiplexing hardware
with 8x, and then 16x....

Why isn't there a simple southbridge to external port connector
available yet? Like the PCI-SIG external PCI-e connector, I don't
care if it will have 60 pins and cost 50$ a meter. Add a internal
display input HDMI and you're done. Almost 2013, and we can't get
that "high tech" out?!

I know 4x of thunderbolt is enough for some cards but all of this should
have been easy and cheap. They just wanna sell all this 600$ cases...


I'm guessing the answer is planned obsolescence and that's
just depressing.

 

True thunderbolt pcie 2.0 x4 is not "slow". It has about a 10-15% loss in performance compared to full pcie x16 performance. Once they arrive, thunderbolt e-gpus will be very, very functional.

As to why there hasn't been any true enclosures for cheap, I personally think the market just isn't there yet (or demand in better words). Even though all of us on this site are very familiar with external graphics, not many other people know about it. The crowd is going, but companies are going to spend the kind of money to mass produce these enclosures. Also, thunderbolt is no cheap. Buying it as-is from Intel is $30 just for the connector. They then have to make a profit off it, increasing the price. I really hope than one day a company will take a risk and release a real thunderbolt e-gpu, but so far we just have to be patient.

 

Well, seeing that pci express is already available in all laptops, it is mature and already comes in many different mechanical formats, I fail to understand why thunderbolt should necessarily be the preferred interface for future implementation of eGPUs. We already have a low latency, high bandwidth interface to take advantage of. It was an ATI technology called XGP implemented before in Fujitsu Siemens Graphic Booster iirc.

 

It is slow, what if you wanted a SLI configuration ? Or a really high end card?
So when you come back home, you plug in your ultrabook an external case and
three monitors Should we wait for thunderbolt 2?

What I'm saying is all we need is access to the pci bus nothing special.
No need for high speed multiplexing like thunderbolt does...

And I think right now there isn't a market because no ones knows about it.

 

There's a point at which it doesn't even matter. With thunderbolt, the constraint isn't the graphics card; its the CPU. Laptops just don't have a good enough CPU and hold back the graphics cards (a laptop with a quad core i7 and 560 egpu is going to be faster than a dual core i5 with a 660ti because the cpu is holding back the game).

On TomsHardware reviews when they had an article on the sonnet echo express pro and external graphics, they had graphs of gaming. On a cpu intense game (I think it was wow) the 6950 and 460 had the exact same frames per second because the CPU they had wasn't able to handle the game. In another game that was more dependent on the GPU, the 6950 ran laps around the 460. x4 is nowhere near "1/4th" the power of pcie x16. As I said before, there is a very small loss in performance.
Also, laptops don't have enough free resources for SLI to work. It's really the laptops that are holding back the power of external graphics, not the connectors. And my express card setup runs two monitors fine, so thunderbolt will be able to run 3 with a decent card well (but I see the point you are making).

None the less, I completely agree with the point you made about Intel milking thunderbolt. This is honestly a great technology, but they're not allowing many companies to use it for what could possibly the next big thing (e-gpus). And as you said, there just isn't a big demand for external graphics because no one out of this forum really knows about it well. I think it has grown immensely this past year, but it's going to take more than that to really kick start external graphics via thunderbolt (or something better..?)

Edit: Just to add in another point, laptop manufacturers need to start paying attention to external graphics. They need to make the BIOS much more e-gpu friendly. A company like NVidia could easily fix the error 12 issue that plagues many users, but they don't -.-. Sometimes these big companies can be a bit too agonizing.

 

Good point about the bios.

Yea I agree that some laptops cpu maybe too weak for
some games, but for others its the GPU. The wow
benchmark shows that the latency and limited
bandwidth does cut the 6950 performance on
the same pc in half. (Its probably latency than bandwidth)

Laptop cpus are strong enough, just look at alienware
m18x for an extreme example. Capable of running
bf3 and metro at max detail at or over 60fps.
It can configured with ation Crossfire. Wouldn't
you want the same laptop with a 12" screen
and leave the Crossfire setup at home with
your big screen?

Games that use lots of geometry, textures or other
resources that constantly update to the GPU will be
affected by the limited bandwidth. And of course
resolution.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way a graphic
enthusiast (I'll take gameplay over graphics any day),
but at least in my opinion. thunderbolt is nothing
special and only limiting compared to a proper
external pcie-e (or mxm that some people here tried)
And if it is enough for now it won't be in the really near future.

Maybe PCI-SIG OCuLink will bring some hope?

 

Yeah, I guess I'm mostly talking about dual core cpu's ( mobile quad cores seem to fair very well). In my mind, the perfect e-gpu laptop would be a 13inch 1080p screen that had an hd4000 and quad core cpu, giving it the best of both worlds in terms of cpu and graphics capability (My guess is that at 1080p, a 660ti which is capable of running many games on max settings would be the best card to pick for external graphics).

I definitely agree that a direct pci-e connection should just be added onto computers. But sadly, thunderbolt is the only consumer ready solution (at least it would be if intel stopped being so closed with it). It is a good step in the right direction, but it's going to take more than that to achieve x16. And as more games take advantage of all that bandwidth, they're going to need more than x4.

 

Agreed, truly sad. Well, its amplified for me because where I live at
laptops with any decent graphics card cost about 1600$.
For example macbook pro costs from 1600$ (13" 2.5GHZ Intel HD4000)
to 4000$ (15" Retina 2.5GHZ, NVidia 650M).

 

They will launch a thunderbolt 4th generation (2.0 x8) in 2014, maybe the end of 2013.
So yeah, It'll take some time.
But this last 2 years there's been many companies that are selling for the first time some thunderbolt PCIe extenders already with 2.0 x4
So eventually, when people start to notice this and buy those adapters, Intel will start to think about creating even faster cables to use all the power of the motherboard.

 

Checking in a year later, Any news? (Besides Acer ditched thunderbolt. TH05 recalled.)

4th gen I7 CPU are all over the place and are really close (and sometimes better) than desktop CPUs:



AnandTech Portal | Analyzing the Price of Mobility: Desktops vs. Laptops

GPU are still as expensive and power angry, so if you wanna game you'll probably want to dock.
And If I dock I don't mind having my spare desktop gpu (3 years old but still faster than a 765m) be put in a box connected to my laptop and 23" LCD.
While still enjoying the potability of a small laptop.

 

we have TB 2 to be launched a little bit later. its 2x as fast as TB 1

while acer ditched TB, others picked it up

 

I was a expecting a larger adoption of TB, maybe TB2 will boost it but I'm skeptical.