14 DAY TRIAL // Intel’s ThunderBolt technology might actually get a useful line of devices that will truly put all that bandwidth to good use. Lucid is hard at work developing an external TunderBolt dock that will allow the user to access the performance of a discrete GPU on his ultra-thin notebook.
The company is an expert at harnessing the performance and capabilities of different GPUs on the same system.
Intel uses Lucid’s software to allow the user to enjoy the compute power inside the company’s integrated graphics processing units (iGPU) while saving power when the discrete and powerful 3D graphics adapter in the system is not in use.
Lucid’s rise to fame was done through the company’s physical and software implementation of a complete solution that was able to make a computer system support and efficiently use the 3D power of two or more different graphics cards from different GPU makers.
Therefore, the company has the knowledge and experience to develop high-speed interface chips along with the necessary drivers and software that will offer the user a unique opportunity of having a very slim and light mobile computer and also have great 3D performance available if needed.
The impressive bandwidth that Intel’s ThunderBolt offers was only really used by high speed external HDD enclosures with several SSDs inside that were part of a RAID matrix.
These solutions are very expensive are have little usefulness for the average user, but most of UltraBook and ultra-thin owners are wishing for better 3D performance.
Therefore, Lucid has reportedly recently demonstrated an external video card dock that uses an AMD Radeon HD 6700 series graphics adapter.
Such an implementation, while far from being cheap, will be much more accessible than a 6-bay external HDD enclosure with fast HDDs or SSDs inside.
Even so, Intel’s ThunderBolt is several times slower than the usual PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot that offers an 8 GB/s bandwidth.
The 3rd-generation PCI Express x16 slot has an amazing 12.8 GB/s bandwidth and that’s over 10 times more than the 1.25 GB/s that ThunderBolt offers right now.
On the other hand, Lucid’s solution brings much better performance than Intel’s own HD2500 and HD4000 iGPU so mobile users in search of a decent 3D gaming experience will certainly give it a try.