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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing this will happen ever since the first MacBooks started to be released with Thunderbolt; it seems the market for those who would actually buy an expensive external card/enclosure would already be fairly limited (if you need something on a desktop, why not just a separate highly optimized gaming rig?), and on top of that, it sounds like AMD is planning on adding yet another new external adapter/standard, and not leveraging Thunderbolt 2 or USB C.

Sounds like yet another flash in the pan to me. VR could be a killer feature, of course, and price would determine the success, but unless they use a standard connector and don't require all manufacturers to add in yet another display/bus to the thin laptops, I don't see this going anywhere.

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I did a huge bunch of research on eGPUs before I gave up and purchased a PC: the main issue (18 months ago) is that Intel won't certify any of the Thunderbolt eGPUs since they don't have OS X drivers, as part of Intel's agreement with Apple. Both Asus and another company had tech ready to go, but they couldn't get permission to release them from Intel.

Surely the main issue 18 months ago was that Intel simply didn't support eGPU on TB2, whereas they do officially support it on TB3?

Intel formally announced support for eGPUs when they revealed TB3.

Everyone can do eGPUs now via USB-C that uses TB3 via alt mod protocol. Razor was the first one to support this a few months ago with their Blade ultrabook. Sadly, they are behind with releasing the eGPU case but their case can by used on any laptop that has TB3 and as long as the manufacturer has not disabled some stuff for TB3 via the bios.

If Asus have it ready, then where is it?

Since i need a Type-C Dockingstation anyhow for my next Notebook (probably XPS 13 or 15) i'm quite intrigued by the idea of a eGPU Case (Razer Core most likely), since its going to be a piece of kit that i can use over multiple generations of notebooks AND graphics cards, instead of buying the Dell TB 15 Dock which may or may not be working on any non-dell machine. 2x4k at 60hz from a 13 inch PC is finally becoming feasible.

Yeah. It's ridiculous that it's taking this long, since the problem of "make PCI-E available outside of the case" has been solved in various forms for a few years now. I know it's not QUITE that simple, but it sounds like it has more political challenges than engineering challenges for the past while.

When asked about this, Intel said the reason they didn't support it before was because there were issues with hot-plugging the externally cases, it would cause all sorts of issues in the OS and drivers.

Asus and (other company who I forget) debuted their kit in 2013 at E3 or similar. I wanted to buy one buy then but couldn't get it as Intel weren't certifying it - they probably used TB2.

Also I think the thin laptops are a big part of the problem with the PC industry.

They are trying so hard to compete with phones they aren't doing anything to improve performance. Back in the day you could buy a new PC every 2 years and get a big performance boost, today that is not so. Get a cheap netbook and put in an SSD and you'll get something that feels more responsive than an i7 machine saddled with a mechanical drive.

No wonder people are not buying PCs. I remember when Tom's hardware used to be interesting but for a long time they have been colonized by this "power efficiency" thing which is really bogus because you can work really hard to power optimize your machine and then some stupid flash ad makes your CPU spin at 100% and it is all for nought. People buy things because of product attributes they can feel, not because of attributes which require careful measurement under controlled conditions

I can physically feel if my fan is spinning. Getting a couple of points more in some benchmark I can not feel.

I prefer quiet.

Also, even though I loved fanless, low heat electronics. The lack of noise (or even LEDs) disturbs me. I liked these communication sidechannels.

Water cooling.

It was a painful and costly (+$150) lesson for me to learn that most of the watercooling systems are actually louder than standard fans.

A few years ago I built a pretty awesome-looking, water-cooling machine, and just the noise of the water pump was louder than anything I had before. The fans I needed to the radiator also were just as loud as my previous GPU fan.

Yeah, big air cooling has come a long way. My i5-2500k on a stable 4.5ghz with 2 Radeons is nearly silent (thanks Antec Sonata + extra acoustic damping sheets inside). It's hard to beat a NH-D15 these days, and phase change is an order of magnitude more costly.

I have an old-ish Celeron CPU with 2.6 GHz which costs about 35$ a few years back. I still use it as my main PC and it is more than fine for every task (except video encoding and compiling large projects). I was thinking about upgrading but it just does not make any sense to invest money in this. Instead I am going to buy a better monitor this year.

Including SSDs, often by default, is improving performance. Most laptops also come with way more RAM than they did just a few years ago. And the newer 6th-gen Core processors are faster than say 3rd-gen and much more power-efficient. A laptop with a charge left is infinitely faster than one with a flat battery!

Hell yeah.

If Microsoft, at some point, said that you couldn't put a windows 10 or 11 sticker on a machine that has a mechanical C: drive, everybody would be saying that this version of Windows is awesomely faster than anything they've seen before.

Discrete GPUs just aren't of any use to the vast majority of people.

I would much rather have a laptop that can get through a full 16 hour day when necessary than one that was twice as fast.

I'd much rather not have a laptop (for work).

Study after study have shown that screen real estate and system performance improve our work output, let us use more of our working memory for task-critical state, etc.

If you need portability, then sure, laptops are necessary trade-off so that you can get any work done at all. However, that's all they are: a trade-off.

It's a shame if we're only optimizing for use cases that are ultimately regressive.

Most of the time, I use my laptop docked to two large monitors. But even still, I value the ability to take it unplugged for 12+ hours at a time when I'm travelling much more than I would value it being faster.

This, and this is why I loved the 17" MBP. I'd love a 19" rMBP with 4K or even native QHD screen, dedicated graphics, two SSDs (M.2 would be fine), lots of fast IO ports, and an all-day battery. I don't care how thin it is. It would spend most of the time docked to 2 or 3 external 4K displays for "real work", but then come with me to meetings and on trips.

The only thing that comes close right now is a Thinkpad P70. Can get it with 64GB ECC RAM, Xeon E3-1505m, 4K 17" screen, 2 SSDs + 1 HDD, and a Quadro M5000M. The only problem is that it can't run OSX in some supported fashion, and the battery life likely isn't great. Sad that Apple has been falling short in the professional market for a while now and they expect everyone to be happy with thinner & lighter.

Why not both? I have a few laptops, and a high-end desktop; I get the best possible performance when I'm working at a desk, and acceptable performance when I'm traveling.

It's a pain keeping multiple computers in sync. And my laptop is a 2.7GHz Core i7 with 20GB of RAM that's more than fast enough for anything I do.

It's really not a pain; just update the SCM working copy.

If your project has tendrils into the local system, that's the real problem to fix, because it's going to introduce pointless inefficiency at every level: new developer setup, production deployment, support for enterprise-installation, and ... inability to use the ideal hardware. available.

Performance translates directly into working efficiency. There's no such thing as "fast enough", there's only "too expensive".

With good scaling, performance and battery life are related. If the CPU can quickly finish what you ask it to do and get back into a low power state you can get better battery life.

I agree with general idea. But, man you need to stop spending 16 hours / day in front of laptop.

posting this from a Chromebook C720P running gentoo linux on a custom hard drive. Cost $350 for a fast PC with 8 hours of battery life.

I would not be surprised if this was to get more of a grip on the VR market in the future. Consider that Oculus have stated the current Mac family cannot be supported due to their built in GPUs being insufficiently powerful and non replaceable [1].

So possibly a long play on VR taking off, wanting to provide support to Macs and stopping dominance by Nvidia.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijyBMpm2bqQ

As mentioned in the article, several manufacturers have developed their own proprietary external GPU systems. The market might not be huge, but it definitely exists.

AMD have been fairly good at providing open source software and freely licensed standards, certainly much better than Nvidia. Their adaptive frame rate technology is royalty-free, they have an MIT-licensed middleware platform for games and GPGPU programming, and they are the main backer of Vulkan.

But Thunderbolt 3 already exists, and both Intel and Nvidia support it. Intel does not have any discrete GPUs of their own, of course, but they did open up Thunderbolt 3 to external GPUs. Nvidia drivers have already been updated to support external GPUs over Thunderbolt 3.

Thunderbolt 3 external GPU enclosures are still rare, but products such as the Razer Core are on the way and should work with any laptop that supports Thunderbolt 3, of which there are a growing number.

There should be nothing stopping AMD from supporting eGPU enclosures via Thunderbolt 3. I'm honestly perplexed why they think we need yet another competing standard.

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