External GPU for Sony laptops

[mattjd]

Came across this and it is quite interesting that you can use external graphics cards with light peak technology with laptops now

The Mac thunderbolt is the same technology but just a different a name.

http://9to5mac.com/2011/06/27/sony-debuts-light-peak-product-in-europe-with-external-gpu/

I wonder if this is what they are going to do more and more with laptops and tablets. Buy a laptop or tablet with standard integrated graphics and then use an external card for jobs that require a good card.

 

[powelly]

external gpu's are nothing new, they just never kicked off

 

[Adrianr]

Very interesting. Wonder what sort of boosts these will be able to provide over Lightpeak.

 

[Rroff]

So basically somewhere in the region of PCI-e 1.x @ 2x or PCI-e 2.0 @ 1x link bandwidth then - not exactly gonna set the world on fire and already been done in the past but not very useful for anything faster than a low end GPU.

 

[Meaker]

It depends how many lanes you link up to the thunderbolt chip actually.

Plus over at notebookreview we have had external graphics cards up to a GTX580 on a PCI-express 4x link for some time

 

[Rroff]

How does it fair compared to a full x16 slot? IIRC back along when the nVidia 200 series was benchmarked on different lane sizes x4 was still about 75% of the performance with a GTX280 whereas below x4 it dropped off quite severely.

 

[Meaker]

You can make a 12" lenovo machine score over 18k in 3dmark 06.