> Meanwhile gamers will be happy to hear that Intel is finally moving forward on external graphics via Thunderbolt, and after more than a few false starts, external GPUs now have the company’s blessing and support. While Thunderbolt has in theory always been able of supporting external graphics (it’s just a PCIe bus), the biggest hold-up has always been handling what to do about GPU hot-plugging and the so-called “surprise removal” scenario. Intel tells us that they have since solved that problem, and are now able to move forward with external graphics. The company is initially partnering with AMD on this endeavor – though nothing excludes NVIDIA in the long-run – with concepts being floated for both a full power external Thunderbolt card chassis, and a smaller “graphics dock” which contains a smaller, cooler (but still more powerful than an iGPU) mobile discrete GPU.
Is 40 Gbps sufficient for modern graphics cards? (I genuinely have no idea, but I know there was a concern that previous versions of Thunderbolt wouldn't have enough bandwidth, and it's still a lot less than PCIe x16).
It'd be really nice to see Apple get on board with this. I'd love a thin-and-light laptop with the option of a dedicated graphics at my desk.
Has intel said anything about loosening their grip on the thunderbolt spec to make it easier for people to implement thunderbolt on devices? I can rather easily download the datasheets for intel's processors, their chipsets, etc, without registering for a site or anything, but not the info on their thunderbolt controllers. It seems just a bit silly that I can get more info on their top of the line $3000 processors than their $10 thunderbolt chips.
Hmm interesting to hear that now passive cables are possible (albeit only 20GBit/s). This will surely drive the ridiculously high thunderbolt cable prices down. I wonder if this still requires special thunderbolt cables or wether it will work over fully-connected standard usb-c cables.
Technically it all sounds nice, but in actually practice I will never, ever use a computer with only a single USB-C port for power and all USB accessories. Pry my better designed and more usable laptops out of my cold dead hands. :) Hopefully Apple changes their mind.
