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Thunderbolt External GPUs

Retrostarscream

Retrostarscream

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 13, 2010
99
17
Miami FL
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I once heard a macrumors reader comment on this subject of the possibility of external GPUs with thunderbolt connectivety.

Just wanted to hear other schools of thought.

Is it feasible!? Could this possibly manifest / materialize itself on the horizon !?
 
It could. It's just an extention of the PCIe bus, just like expresscard (except Thunderbolt is much much faster).

The question is, how much, and will it be too expensive for anyone to care.

I expect to see a "magmabox" style solution where vendors sell a thunderbolt attatched backplane/enclosure with one or more 16x PCIe slots.
 
Retrostarscream said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I once heard a macrumors reader comment on this subject of the possibility of external GPUs with thunderbolt connectivety.

Just wanted to hear other schools of thought.

Is it feasible!? Could this possibly manifest / materialize itself on the horizon !?
Click to expand...

I have, and if it's true, then you could easily set up an epic gaming rig on it.
 
Technically it should be feasible since express card can do it and thunderbolt is even faster. Just need to find a diy method buy a decent desktop card and boom powerrrrrr since these sandy quads are pretty sick and in terms of gaming, the gpu is the bottleneck.
 
i've read there are bandwidth and latency issues that'll prevent true gaming GPUs from being used on these ports for some time.
 
endless17 said:
i've read there are bandwidth and latency issues that'll prevent true gaming GPUs from being used on these ports for some time.
Click to expand...

bandwidth issues are fine since express card did it. You won't get full power of the desktop card you use, but even then they're still pretty powerful. Unsure of latency problems but I would be that was there still on express card port and like I said it's a very popular option that many PC guys use (viDock and DIY vidock).
 
Even thunderbolt in its electric version is not fast enough we would have to wait till full optical light peak, unless somehow the raw processed files from the processor were sent out the thunderbolt cable then processed on the external that then connects to the monitor. Basically the latter is ridicolous and final light peak will be fast enough for a good GPU but currently the electric light peak or thunderbolt is not really fast enough for it to be worth while. And Lightpeak is 10Gb/s and Express Card is 5Gb/s so i wouldn't call lightpeak that much faster then Express Card not saying 5-10Gb/s isnt noticable but :S its only the speed of USB 3 :)
 
Macsavvytech said:
Even thunderbolt in its electric version is not fast enough we would have to wait till full optical light peak, unless somehow the raw processed files from the processor were sent out the thunderbolt cable then processed on the external that then connects to the monitor. Basically the latter is ridicolous and final light peak will be fast enough for a good GPU but currently the electric light peak or thunderbolt is not really fast enough for it to be worth while. And Lightpeak is 10Gb/s and Express Card is 5Gb/s so i wouldn't call lightpeak that much faster then Express Card not saying 5-10Gb/s isnt noticable but :S its only the speed of USB 3 :)
Click to expand...

Lightpeak on the new MBP is much faster than express cards and vidock already makes external enclosures for video cards for the express slot. From every rumor I have read external enclosures for thunderbolt will be avalible some time this year and it would house a video card of your choice. Your monitor would then connect to the enclosure.
 
Macsavvytech said:
Even thunderbolt in its electric version is not fast enough we would have to wait till full optical light peak, unless somehow the raw processed files from the processor were sent out the thunderbolt cable then processed on the external that then connects to the monitor. Basically the latter is ridicolous and final light peak will be fast enough for a good GPU but currently the electric light peak or thunderbolt is not really fast enough for it to be worth while. And Lightpeak is 10Gb/s and Express Card is 5Gb/s so i wouldn't call lightpeak that much faster then Express Card not saying 5-10Gb/s isnt noticable but :S its only the speed of USB 3 :)
Click to expand...

Typical ExpressCard GPU solutions didnt have 5gbps to work with since Rev1.2 was the typical, but this got me to wondering if the new MBPs support Version 2.0 of ExpressCard. Id presume even 5gbps would be sufficient.

Remember the external card does most of the processing in its internal memory with its own GPU, so as long as the textures are pushed to the card fast and the bandwidth and latency are sufficient for vertex/processing data, the card is a standalone component. If the framebuffer needed to be accessed by the regular CPU, then you would be correct. I've always felt that USB3 would make externalGPUs truly feasible, so TB would just give more capability.



-C
 
While one has much more speed than with the expresscard slot it still only is PCIe x4 and thus it works for many GPUs but one shouldn't dream of some HD 6990 in an external box driving his/her 27" screen.
I believe it will still only be a viable solution for 13" MBP and people who need cad or want to drive lots of displays.
 
i think sony will pub a new machine which include a thunderbolt base station though thunderbolt. (blue ray, external GPU some more usb/FW prots and larger battery ect.)
 
I'm sure Sony will go to great lengths to prevent their base station from being used by competitors.
 
I only have one question: can an external TB GPU be fast enough to at least exceed the power that of current integrated GPUs found in the new Macbook Pros. For example, can we expect more one to be more powerful than the current Intel HD 3000?
 
Icaras said:
I only have one question: can an external TB GPU be fast enough to at least exceed the power that of current integrated GPUs found in the new Macbook Pros. For example, can we expect more one to be more powerful than the current Intel HD 3000?
Click to expand...

Easily. It should be able to easily exceed the capability of even the 6750M.

A link I just found:
http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/25/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x4x4

As Light Peak (Thunderbolt name still stupid) should be able to support 2 PCIe 2 lanes, you should easily be able to provide enough bandwidth to a big, hungry desktop card to get some great framerates out, even at high resolutions and graphics settings. After all, once the GPU has its textures, you don't really have to give it much more, and just need to pipe the screen frames back to the main monitor.
 
Erasmus said:
Easily. It should be able to easily exceed the capability of even the 6750M.

A link I just found:
http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/25/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x4x4

As Light Peak (Thunderbolt name still stupid) should be able to support 2 PCIe 2 lanes, you should easily be able to provide enough bandwidth to a big, hungry desktop card to get some great framerates out, even at high resolutions and graphics settings. After all, once the GPU has its textures, you don't really have to give it much more, and just need to pipe the screen frames back to the main monitor.
Click to expand...

My guess is the large slot requirement has much more to do with power than bandwidth. You don't want people thinking they can stick in 4 GTX 580s in a board and expecting the computer to boot.
 
for use with the built in (laptop screen) this seems extravagant but for connecting to a large external or multiple external monitors this would be a terrific solution.

dependent upon the throughput it could be possible to include an optical drive or hd storage built in alongside the gpu and maybe some usb ports for keyboard/mouse.

how long then before we extend thunderbolt to our phones/tablets for similar purposes (docking)
 
Oh my God. Does this mean that you can use any desktop GPU or are you limited to what Lenovo or some company produces? This is going to be epic, I can't wait.

EDIT: Would you be able to SLI or Crossfire this thing?
 
Interesting link:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/25.html

They tested a desktop HD5870 at 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x (PCI-E 2.0)

It's performance, even at 1x, is very impressive compared with Notebook GPUs - so a Thunderbolt GPU will be a great option, assuming it's stable and has OS support.

Thunderbolt bandwidth will fall somewhere between a 1x and 4x PCI-E 2.0 slot - probably closer to 4x, but because of overheads not equivalent. But still, a solution like this will perform very well :)

Edit: I see they also did it for the GTX 480, but not at 1x (card wouldn't operate at 1x).

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_480_PCI-Express_Scaling/24.html
 
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Now if they will just fix the price...about a week ago I got an email from Magma saying they were shipping in December. I had the "opportunity" to pre-order to the tune of $979, plus I still would need a video card and monitor.
 
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