External PCI express dock with Thunderbolt?

[DTphonehome]

Since Thunderbolt is based on PCIe, would it be theoretically possible for a company to make an external dock that contains a slot for PCIe devices? Imagine the possibilities... a high-end graphics card for when you're at home/work, integrated graphics on the road; RAID arrays, etc, etc.

Any thoughts?

 

[strang]

Totally possible. Not really affordable. Hopeful for the future.

When Intel scales Thunderbolt to 100 Gbps, there will be no reason why there shouldn't be an external PCI Express docking solution.

http://pwn3d.com/will-thunderbolt-make-user-upgradeable-extern

Don't mean to plug my blog but I had some links to what's currently available commercially in it.

 

[Hellhammer]

Well, Thunderbolt provides only 10Gb/s (1.25GB/s) while PCIe 2.0 x16 for example provides 64Gb/s (8GB/s). For higher-end GPU, you really want at least PCIe 2.0 x8 which is still over three times faster than TB. It's possible but unfortunately TB is too slow for powerful GPUs.

 

[strang]

http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock

Expensive though. This solution uses ExpressCard. As far as I know it's mostly PCI-E x1. Some hardware is capable of x2 and x4 through ExpressCard.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/418851-diy-vidock-experiences.html

x4 is certainly capable, but 100 Gbps is what you want.