14 DAY TRIAL // Even though external graphics cards have failed to capture the imagination of the computing market, Nvidia is still keen on developing such solutions and is currently working on an external GPU for notebook computers.
This information was unveiled by the Fudzilla publication which talked with Rene Haas, General Manager of Nvidia’s notebook division.
Nvidia's representative hasn't revealed too many details about the state of this external graphics solution or about its specs, but it seems like it will be based on a 28nm core, which means that the GPU will arrive in 2012 at the earliest.
As far as the interface used for connecting the external graphics core to the computer is concerned, Intel's Thunderbolt technology is the most likely candidate as its one of the few solutions, if not the only, available at this time that can offer the required bandwidth.
The Thunderbolt technology was developed in order to provide a unified interface with enough bandwidth to replace all the current connection buses, such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire or PCI Express.
Although this first iteration of Thunderbolt is still far away from reaching that goal, it still manages to join together the PCI Express and the DisplayPort interfaces and can provide, in theory, 20Gbps of upstream and 20Gbps of downstream bandwidth (via two 10Gbps bidirectional channels).
Thunderbolt can also daisy chain up to 7 devices and deliver a maximum of 10W of power without requiring any additional connectors.
Since Thunderbolt was introduced, quite a few companies have announced their support for the technology, but, as we speak, the only computing devices to include this interface are built by Apple and Sony.
The latter already uses an external GPU, developed by AMD, for the latest generation of the VAIO Z notebook, which connects to the system via a Thunderbolt interface.