This is why I was asking whether there was ever a dock made for a specific computer that had this feature: it requires the guest's disk's OS to have drivers to let it boot the host—or even hardware compatibility such that docking the "guest" would cause it to hibernate to disk, and then boot from that same hibernation image on the host. That basically requires the host and guest [the dock and the portable] to be made together.
(And that's not even getting into weird things you could do with live process migration and NUMA and memory hotplug if you want to make both the host's and guest's processors available without an effective reboot/hibernation/sleep step.)
An aside: before it was revealed what exactly the Nintendo Switch was (a portable with a variable clock rate that overclocks itself when plugged into a heatsink dock), I had a suspicion that it might use this architecture: a portable that just turns itself into a disk and Bluetooth controller for a more powerful non-portable when plugged into it.
Like the Razer Core, with USB-C. Yep, I can see this happening, but also remote gaming where you rent the workstation and just get a thin client which only has to be able to download and see the 'movie'.
Gaming-wise, I can also see use cases where you want to get additional CPU power.
Yeah, I was thinking of my Surface Book (with the graphics card in the base).
> Yep, I can see this happening, but also remote gaming where you rent the workstation and just get a thin client which only has to be able to download and see the 'movie'.
I suspect the inherent latency will always argue against remote gaming - especially for the kind of games where you most want extra computing power.
Excellent example. In theory it could also work with devices like the newest MBPs.
> I suspect the inherent latency will always argue against remote gaming - especially for the kind of games where you most want extra computing power.
Not necessarily. FPS and perhaps LoL, sure. RPG such as WoW, not really.
Not sure about AR/VR.
If one doesn't have/want a PC workstation with a strong graphics card, and one does have a laptop, why not just a Razer Core or akin device?
Until we can just have those in the device itself. But that is gonna take a while!
Sort of like an iMac's Target Display Mode, but in reverse: instead of the "guest" computer doing the work and the "host" computer acting as a dumb frame-buffer, the "host" does the work and the "guest" acts as a Thunderbolt hub.