Re:Microsoft announces Surface Go
by tgb on Tuesday July 10, 2018 @07:34AM
(#17497155)
Thunderbolt 3 is certainly enough - see its use in eGPU setups. (My understanding is that this actually runs PCIe lines over it.)
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Nice, but are 4PCIe lanes enough (I read TB3 emulates 4)? Don't GPUs use more lanes?
At least for graphic cards, 4 lines are enough. Linus tech tips did some videos on external gpu enclosures (e.g. [1]).
Conclusion was, if I recall correctly, that the performance declined around 10% when using such an enclosure.
Pretty cool.
Question is, could you fit that tech in a smartphone?
In theory, at least, you could build a cellphone around a GPU with a couple ARM cores thrown in and keep most of the GPU powered down while you are not docked. When you are connected to a decent power supply over USB-C, you could fire up those cores, provided your phone's back is a massive heat sink (a dock can provide the airflow).
It won't beat a 300W monster or accurately predict the future weather for 10 years, but it'd be more than reasonable for casual gaming.
My idea was that the system I dock my smartphone into would add display, input and extra compute via TB
But why do you want to move the computing power? The hardware is ubiquitous and cheap. It's your data that's unique.
They do, but you can go quite far without having them, so it's likely not much of an issue It seems unlikely you'd do very GPU-bandwidth intense applications which such a hybrid device.
Thunderbolt 3 bottlenecks many GPUs. It's not fast enough yet. More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Zw-DlTn-M